Part 47

“Dr. Strong spends a lot more time watching us than he does watching Charley,” remarked Junkum. “Who’s the sick one, anyway—us or him?” she concluded, her resentment getting the better of her grammar.

“Ho!” jeered Bobs, and intoned the ancient couplet, made and provided for the correction of such slips:—

“Her ain’t a-callin’ we, Us don’t belong to she.”

“Anyhow, I ain’t sick,” asseverated Bettina; “but he shut me up in my room for a day jus’ because my swallow worked kinda hard.”

“If I’m going to have scarlet fever I want to have scarlet fever and get done with it!” declared.

Bobs. “I’m getting tired of staying out of school. Charley’s having all the fun there is out of this, getting read to all the time by that nurse and Mother.”

Meantime nothing of interest was happening in the sick-room. Interesting phases seldom appear in scarlet fever, which is well, since, when they do appear, the patient usually dies. Not at any time did Charley evince the slightest tendency to forsake a world which he had found, on the whole, to be a highly satisfactory place of residence. In fact, he was going comfortably along through a typically light onset of the disease; and was rather less ill than he would have been with a sound case of measles. Already the furrows in Mrs. Clyde’s forehead had smoothed out, and Grandma Sharpless had ceased waking, in the dead of night, with a catch at her heart and the totally unfounded fear that she had “heard something,” when one morning Charley awoke, scratched a tiny flake of skin off his nose, yawned, and emitted a hollow groan.

“What is it, Charley boy?” asked his mother.

“I’m tired of staying in bed,” announced the young man.

“How do you feel?”

The patient sat up, the better to consider the matter. “I feel,” he stated in positive accents, “like a bucket of oyster stew, a steak as big as my head, with onions all over it, a whole apple pie, a platter of ice-cream, and a game of baseball.”

Mrs. Clyde laughed happily. “I’ll tell the Health Master,” she said. She did, and Dr. Strong came up and looked the patient over carefully.

“You lie back there, young fellow,” he ordered, “and play sick, no matter how well you feel, until I tell you different.”

“How about that beefsteak and pie, Doctor?” inquired the boy wistfully.

“Mere prospects,” retorted the hard-hearted physician. “But you can have some ice-cream.” Conclave of the elders that evening to consider the situation was opened by Dr. Strong.

“We’ve now reached the critical point,” he began.

“Critical?” gasped Mrs. Clyde, whose nerves had been considerably stretched in the ten days of sick-room work. “Isn’t he getting well?”

“He’s getting well quite as quickly as I want him to. Perhaps a little more quickly. The fever is broken and he is beginning to peel.”

“Then what’s the difficulty?” inquired Mr. Clyde.

“Just this. Charley is a sturdy boy. The light attack he’s had hasn’t begun to exhaust his vitality. From now on, he is going to be a bundle of energy, without outlet.”

“From now on till when?” It was Grandma Sharpless who wanted to know.

“Two weeks anyway. Perhaps more.”

“Are you going to keep that poor child in bed for two weeks after he’s practically well?” said the mother.

“For three weeks if the whole family will help me. It’s not going to be easy.”

“Isn’t that a little extreme, Strong?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“Only the precaution of experience. The danger-point in scarlet fever isn’t the illness; it’s the convalescence. People think that when a child is cured of a disease, he is cured of the effects of the disease also. That mistake costs lives.”

“Because the poison is still in the system?”

“Rather, the effects of the poison. Though the patient may feel quite well, the whole machinery of the body is out of gear. What do you do when your machinery goes wrong, Clyde?”