“Do you mean to tell me a boy travels thousands of miles to see his brother, and then he gets on the next bus and comes home?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

Annabel could think of no immediate question with which to counter this absurd answer. She sat in the undersized rocking chair next to his bed, silent for a moment, and stared at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the opposite wall.

“Well,” she said at length, “how d’you feel? Dr. B. says you can get dressed and come downstairs whenever you want to.”

“Oh, I don’t feel that good yet.”

“Your temperature’s almost normal. Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel stronger. Clinton, what did Berry-berry’s friends have to say about him?”

“Who?”

“Surely you met some of his friends, people who knew him!”

Clinton remained silent.

“What about the man he was going into business with? Didn’t you talk to him? Or if they’d already gone out to catch some fish, there must have been other fishermen who knew both of them. I’m not sure you used your head, mister. I’m not at all. Now look: the telegram said they make five-day trips. Anybody in his right mind would wait for his brother to get back. Especially after spending all that money on bus fare.”

“I didn’t see any point in waitin’ around. Everybody said he’d left town, so . . .”

“Everybody!” Annabel exclaimed. “Who?”

“I told you, the clerk at the hotel.”

“One little clerk is not ‘everybody.’ “

“All right, I was just now exaggeratin’. It wasn’t everybody, it was the clerk. —Besides, talking so much makes me feel dizzy.”

Annabel looked steadily into his eyes.

“No kidding,” he said. “I feel really lousy.”

Similar interrogations were to take place regularly, sometimes two or three of them in the course of a day.

That evening, after dinner, Ralph climbed the stairs and appeared at the door of Clinton’s room. He entered without knocking. Clinton had time to close his notebook, but he did not have time to get it entirely hidden under his blanket.

“Look here, old-kid-old-kid-old-sock,” said Ralph, “since when am I the kind of a sonofabitch you got to hide things from?”

“I thought it was Annabel,” Clinton said.

“Well, I should’ve knocked. But d’you think I give a fiddler’s fee what you write down in them notebooks? They’s nothin’ wrong with the English language. As a matter of fact, English is a fine goddam language. When I was on the bum, I read everything anybody handed me. I had to. I was a public speaker and I had to know my onions. You got a dictionary?”

Clinton pointed to the desk. “There’s one.”

Ralph got the book and handed it to Clinton. “All right, now open it up. Anywhere. I don’t care where. And pick a word. Any word they got in there. And I’ll tell you what it means.”

Clinton said: “Rowan.”

“Which?”

“R-o-w-a-n, rowan.”

“Is that in there?” said Ralph, with disgust. “Here! Give me that book.” Clinton handed him the dictionary. Ralph read aloud: “Rowan. A Eurasian tree.” He closed the book and examined its cover. Then he made his steam-kettle sound of mirth. “I think it’s a crime,” he said, good-naturedly, “slippin’ all those foreign words into an American dictionary. Webster’s Collegiate, my ass. Listen, I had a talk with some snotnose college kid in a saloon one night. You know what he said: Glass—now get this—glass is more perfectly elastic than rubber.” Ralph threw back his head and emitted a long spurt of invisible steam. “Well, I turned to the poor bastard, and I said, ‘Listen, if we leave the world to birds like you, we’ll end up looking through rubber windows, and screwing with glass contraceptives.”