PAGE 7
Her Boss
by
Tilting back his chair–he never assumed this position when he dictated to Miss Doane–Wanning began: “To Mr. D. E. Brown, South Forks, Wyoming.”
He shaded his eyes with his hand and talked off a long letter to this man who would be sorry that his mortal frame was breaking up. He recalled to him certain fine months they had spent together on the Wind River when they were young men, and said he sometimes wished that like D. E. Brown, he had claimed his freedom in a big country where the wheels did not grind a man as hard as they did in New York. He had spent all these years hustling about and getting ready to live the way he wanted to live, and now he had a puncture the doctors couldn’t mend. What was the use of it?
Wanning’s thoughts were fixed on the trout streams and the great silver-firs in the canyons of the Wind River Mountains, when he was disturbed by a soft, repeated sniffling. He looked out between his fingers. Little Annie, carried away by his eloquence, was fairly panting to make dots and dashes fast enough, and she was sopping her eyes with an unpresentable, end-of-the-day handkerchief.
Wanning rambled on in his dictation. Why was she crying? What did it matter to her? He was a man who said good-morning to her, who sometimes took an hour of the precious few she had left at the end of the day and then complained about her bad spelling. When the letter was finished, he handed her a new two dollar bill.
“I haven’t got any change tonight; and anyhow, I’d like you to eat a whole lot. I’m on a diet, and I want to see everybody else eat.”
Annie tucked her notebook under her arm and stood looking at the bill which she had not taken up from the table.
“I don’t like to be paid for taking letters to your friends, Mr. Wanning,” she said impulsively. “I can run personal letters off between times. It ain’t as if I needed the money,” she added carelessly.
“Get along with you! Anybody who is eighteen years old and has a sweet tooth needs money, all they can get.”
Annie giggled and darted out with the bill in her hand.
Wanning strolled aimlessly after her into the reception room.
“Let me have that letter before lunch tomorrow, please, and be sure that nobody sees it.” He stopped and frowned. “I don’t look very sick, do I?”
“I should say you don’t!” Annie got her coat on after considerable tugging. “Why don’t you call in a specialist? My mother called a specialist for my father before he died.”
“Oh, is your father dead?”
“I should say he is! He was a painter by trade, and he fell off a seventy-foot stack into the East River. Mother couldn’t get anything out of the company, because he wasn’t buckled. He lingered for four months, so I know all about taking care of sick people. I was attending business college then, and sick as he was, he used to give me dictation for practise. He made us all go into professions; the girls, too. He didn’t like us to just run.”
Wanning would have liked to keep Annie and hear more about her family, but it was nearly seven o’clock, and he knew he ought, in mercy, to let her go. She was the only person to whom he had talked about his illness who had been frank and honest with him, who had looked at him with eyes that concealed nothing. When he broke the news of his condition to his partners that morning, they shut him off as if he were uttering indecent ravings. All day they had met him with a hurried, abstracted manner. McQuiston and Wade went out to lunch together, and he knew what they were thinking, perhaps talking, about. Wanning had brought into the firm valuable business, but he was less enterprising than either of his partners.