Quin

								

seemed to get together and rush upon him. What if the doctors were
holding him on from month to month, experimenting, promising,
disappointing, only in the end to bunch him with the permanently disabled
and ship him off to some God-forsaken spot to spend the rest of his life
in a hospital?
He gripped his hands over his chest and gave himself up to savage
rebellion. If they would let him alone he might get well! In France it
had been his head. Whenever the wound began to heal and things looked a
bit cheerful, some saw-bones had come along and thumped and probed and
X-rayed, and then it had been ether and an operation and the whole
blooming thing over again. Then, when they couldn't work on his head any
longer, they'd started up this talk about his heart. Of course his heart
was jumpy! All the fellows who had been badly gassed had jumpy hearts.
But how was he ever going to get any better lying there on his back? What
he needed was exercise and decent food and something cheerful to think
about. He wanted desperately to get away from his memories, to forget the
horrors, the sickening sights and smells, the turmoil and confusion of
the past two years. In spite of his most heroic efforts, he kept living
over past events. This time last year he had been up in the Toul sector,
where half the men he knew had gone west. It was up there old Corpy had
got his head shot off....
He resolutely fixed his attention on a spider that was swinging directly
over his head and tried to forget old Corpy. He thought instead of
Captain Phipps, but the thought did not calm him. What sense was there in
his ordering more of this fool rest business? Well, he told himself
fiercely, he wasn't going to stand for it! The war was over, he had done
his part, he was going to demand his freedom. Discipline or no
discipline, he would go over Phipps' head and appeal to the Colonel.
Throwing aside the ice-bag, he looked around for his uniform. But the
nurse had evidently mistrusted the look in his eyes when she gave him the
Captain's orders, for the hook over his bed was empty. He raised himself
in his cot and glared savagely down the ward, sniffing the air
suspiciously. Two orderlies were wheeling No. 17 back from the
operating-room, and Quin already caught the faint odor of ether. The
first whiff of it filled him with loathing.
Thrusting his bare feet into slippers and his arms into a shabby old
bath-robe, he flung himself out of bed and slipped out on the porch. The
air was cold and bracing and gloriously free from the hospital
combination of wienerwürst, ether, and dried peaches that had come to be
a nightmare odor to him. He sat on the railing and drew in deep,
refreshing breaths, and as he did so things began to right themselves.
Fair play to Quin amounted almost to a religion, and it was suddenly
borne in upon him that he would not be where he was had he observed the
rules of the game. But then again, if he had not danced, he never would