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Show I fL THAT OLD MR. CRANE I jjrfu By "-nna E. Wilson OLD MR. CRANE sat in a padded pad-ded armchair before the fire In his room. The pipe and tobacco on the table beside him went untouched. un-touched. Old Mrs. Cranston had given him the pipe and tobacco, the armchair and the basement room. In return he tended the furnace and sometimes swept the floor. Old Mr. Crane began to think about himself as he'd have liked I 1 to have been. He O Minute fine t3 Fiction father and moth-I moth-I I er, maybe a doc tor and a teacher. Someone whose money came in regular and who'd have seen that he got educated; who could have found what he was suited to and maybe given him a start. He'd have married, well, someone like Alda Rich, who used to ride her bicycle past his father's house and who sometimes stopped to speak to him. Alda was Dr. Rich's daughter and spoke to everybody. A nice girl, not stuck-up stuck-up or proud. The children would have been like Alda, too. Two boys and two girls. He'd have called the elder girl Alda and one of the boys for himself, Milton Crane, Jr. People would have written it that way on letters. He'd seen it that way when he'd carried in the mail for old Dr. Rich that summer when he mowed lawns for his keep." Dr. Rich had given him many a stray quarter on I the side. "Seenu as if such a rich country should be able to give you a better chance, son." Young as he was, be jell something both sorrowful and angry in the doctor's voice. After Algy, the smallest, got pneumonia and died, their father had failed. He and Sam bad quit school and gone to work, he himself him-self into the grocery business. But he drifted from job to Job. Sam put It in words', "It's not that you don't mean right or that you're lazy, but it seems like you have got to be moving." Sam had always been good to him Just the same as he had been good to Dad. Sam was dead now. He'd felt bad when Sam died. He'd moved around just as Sam said, and when he was young and strong, he'd managed pretty well harvesting, -lumbering, sailing once on a boat. It's a life that's hard on a man, having no proper comforts. Once Sam had come out to visit him. "You're getting no younger. Maybe you should think of marrying and settling down." TN THE end, he'd had to help out Sam. It hadn't been much he'd had to give Sally when Sam died, but until Sam's boy grew up, he'd stayed at that elevator and worked hard. Sally'd asked him to come and live with them, but Sally had a nice house and, after knocking around all over, a man gets kind of rough. It wouldn't have been fitting, and he'd always tried to do what was fitting. It was in the hospital that Mrs. Cranston found him. She'd given him the room and the chair and yesterday she'd given him the tobacco to-bacco and the pipe, although the furnace was black out. "Never mind the furnace," she'd said, "We'll get someone to look after that just rest." She knew. She was his kind. I They must have told her that he hadn't long to go. It was nice here, dreaming of Alda by the fire, and, maybe, a kid or two, though he'd known well, it wasn't fitting for him to be looking at Alda Rich after her father died. He must have fallen asleep and been talking again for old Mrs. Crans. ton, who bad been Alda Rich, came in. She was holding a glass and there were tears in her voice when she j spoke. . "Drink this. Milt, you've just I been having a bad dream." i Released by WNU Features. |