The Last Adam Read Online Free PDF Page B

know what's wrong with her."
    Janet Cardmaker wore a garment which she had made herself—eight or ten red fox skins sewed over an old cloth coat. Though the cows filled the long cement stable with a humid, ammoniacal warmth, she hadn't bothered to unbutton this. A round cap, also of fox skin, was crammed casually down on her head. The big bones of her face made her look gaunt, but she was, in fact, very solid; stronger than most men; almost as tall as George Bull, and fully a head taller than Harold. Rogers. From under the circular rim of the cap's yellow fox fur some of her dark hair escaped, disordered. Her black eyes rested contemptuously a moment on Harold. She said: "Look at her, will you, George? She's an awful sick cow."
    Harold said: "Might be a kind of milk fever, Doc. I—"
    "Let's see," answered George Bull. "Oh! Down there."
    He walked along the row of placid rumps; the cows, their necks in hangers, patient, incurious. On the cement, the last of the line had collapsed. Released from the hanger, she lay on her side, her lean, bony head against the feeding trough. In her terrible prostration, her ribs rose like a hill. Her great eyes were fixed in a stupor, hopeless and helpless; her legs inertly pointing.
    George Bull stooped, put out a gloved finger and poked her udder.
    "Milk fever, hell!"he said. "And listen to her breathe!"
    Stepping over the stiff out-thrust of the hind legs, he pulled off his glove. Stooping again, he felt along the stretched neck until his big fingers discovered the artery in the lower throat. Compressing it, he looked at his watch. After a moment he announced, "That's better than one hundred." Unbuttoning his coat, he pulled a clinical thermometer case from his pocket, extracted the thermometer. "Good as any other," he said. He shook it, pushed it between the folds of skin where the hind leg lay half over the udder. "Bet you it's a hundred and five," he said. He looked at Harold. "Kind of milk fever, huh? Don't you even know what pneumonia looks like?"
    He recovered the thermometer. "Hundred and four and a half," he observed. "Probably really more. Do you want to try to save her? Devons aren't much use to you anyway."
    "They cost money," answered Janet. "It's not your cow."
    "All right, get together about an acre of mustard plaster. Harold can beat it down to Anderson's pharmacy —" he fumbled until he found a notebook.
    Tearing out a sheet and taking a pencil, he began to write, reading aloud: "Twenty drops of aconite and one ounce of acetate of ammonia in—oh, say, a half-pint of water. Every two hours or so. Get a blanket and cover her up. In the morning, she ought to be dead, so you needn't bother to telephone Torrington for a vet. Harold can fix it."
    "Fix it, Harold," Janet agreed. "Come on up to the house, George."
    The front rooms of the Cardmaker house were as Mr. Rosenthal had left them, stripped of furniture, the stairs with no rail. The new front door was never used. Janet lived in the kitchen wing, principally in the enormous kitchen, sleeping in a small bedroom up the back stairs. A Mrs. Foster came every day in summer, but in winter, when walking was harder, only twice a week, to do what washing and cleaning was done. Janet, when alone, fed herself. Harold Rogers lived with his wife in a cottage on the slope beyond the barn. This Belle Rogers was one of a locally recurring pale, wan, blonde type, descended probably from a single, pale, wan, but prolific individual five or six generations back. Janet ignored Belle's existence, and George Bull didn't doubt that Belle tried to pay Janet back by spreading the continually resowed crop of scandalous rumours about his own intimacy with Janet. It was the sort of pale, wan reprisal you'd expect from Belle; such rumours were an old story and Belle could hardly animate them into interest. George Bull didn't care in the least, remarking to Janet: "Somebody's started them chewing on the same old stuff. By God, I'm sixty-seven years old!