"All right," he said, and went to the door. "Good night," he added, and went out.

I dialed outside, and got Anne's number, and told her the news. She said it was horrible. She kept saying that into the telephone–"It is horrible"–in a low bemused voice, three or four times. Then she thanked me and hung up.

I left the office. I had one more errand to do. I went down to the lobby. Sadie was still there. So I told her. She said it was pretty tough. I agreed.

"It will be tough on the Boss," she said.

"It will be tough as hell on Lucy," I said, "for she is the one who will have to fix the baby. Don't forget that while you're giving out the free samples of sympathy."

She must have been pretty tired or something for that didn't make her mad. So I asked her if I could take her into town. She had her car, too, she said.

"Well, I am going home and sleep forever," I said, and left her in the lobby.

By the time I got out to my car, the sky was curdling blue with dawn.

The accident occurred on Saturday afternoon. The operation was performed just before dawn on Sunday. The big pay-off was on Monday. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving.

That day, there was a gradual piling up of events, then the rush to the conclusion, as when a great weight that has been grinding and slipping suddenly breaks the last mooring and takes the plunge. As I experienced that day, there was at first an impression of the logic of the events, caught flickeringly at moments, but as they massed to the conclusion I was able to grasp, at the time, only the slightest hints as to the pattern that was taking shape. This lack of logic, the sense of people and events driven by impulses which I was no able to define, gave the whole occasion the sense of a dreamlike unreality. It was only after the conclusion, after everything was over, that the sense of reality returned, long after, in fact, when I had been able to gather the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together to see the pattern. This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principle.

Monday morning I got to the office early. I had slept all day Sunday, getting up only in time for a bite of dinner and then some silly movie, and being back in bed by ten-thirty. I came into the office with that sense you get after a lot of sleep of being spiritually pure.

I went back to the Boss's office. He hadn't come in. But while I was there one of the girls came in carrying a big tray piled up with telegrams. "They are all about his boy getting hurt," she said, "and they keep coming in."

"They'll be coming in all day," I said.

That would be true, all right. Every pinfeather politician, county-courthouse janitor, and ambitious lickspittle in the state who hadn't seen the story in the Sunday paper would see it in this morning's paper and get off his telegram. Getting that telegram off would be like praying. You couldn't tell that praying would do any good, but it certainly never did anybody any harm. Those telegrams were part of the system. Like presents for the wedding of a politician's daughter or flowers for a cop's funeral. And it was part of the system, too, for the flowers, now that we are on the subject, to come from Antonio Giusto's flower store. A girl in the flower store kept a record in a special file of all the orders that came in for a cop's funeral, and then Tony just ran through the file after the funeral and checked the names by his master list of perennially bereaved friends and if your name was on the master list it had sure-God better be in the file for Murphy's funeral, and I don't mean any bunch of sweet peas, either. Tony was a good friend of Tiny Duffy.

It was Tiny Duffy who came into the office just as the girl flounced out with a cute little twitch of her skirt. He mooned in with a face full of professional sympathy and mortician's gloom, but as soon as he took in the fact that the Boss was not present he relaxed a little, showed his teeth, and said, "How's tricks?"

I said tricks was O. K.

"You seen the Boss?" he asked.

I shook my head.

 "Gee," he said, and the sympathy and gloom appeared magically on his face, "it is sure tough. It is what I always calls tragic. A kid like that. A good clean square-shooting kid like that. It is tragic, and no mistake."

"You needn't practice on me," I said.

"It will be tough on the Boss," he said, and shook his head.

"Just save your fire till he gets here."

"Where is he?"

"I don't know."

I tried to get hold of him yesterday," Tiny said, "but he wasn't at the Mansion. They said they didn't know where he was, he hadn't been home. He was out to the hospital a while, but I missed him there. He wasn't in a hotel, either."

"You seem to have been thorough," I said.

"Yeah," Tiny said, "I wanted to tell him how us boys all felt."

Just then Calvin Sperling, who was Commissioner of Agriculture, came in with a couple of other fellows. They were wearing crepe on their faces, too, till they saw the Boss was not in. Then they eased off and began to snap their bubble gum. "Maybe he won't be coming." Sperling suggested.

"He'll come," Tiny pronounced. "It won't faze him. The Boss is tough."

A couple more of the fellows came by, and then Morrisey, who had followed Hugh Miller a long time back as Attorney General, after Miller's resignation. The cigar smoke began to get thick.

Once Sadie stopped at the door, laid one hand on the jamb, and surveyed the scene.

"Hi, Sadie," one of the boys said.

She did not respond. She continued her survey for a moment longer, then said, "Jesus Christ," and moved on. I heard the door of her own office shut.

I drifted over to the window back of the Boss's desk and looked out over the grounds. It had rained during the night and now in the weak sunlight the grass and the leaves of the live oaks, even the trailing moss, had a faint sheen, and the damp concrete of the curving drives and walks gave off an almost imperceptible, glimmering reflection. The whole world, the bare boles of the other trees, which had lost their leaves now, the roofs of the houses, even the sky itself, had a pale, washed, relieved look, like the look on the face of a person who has been sick a long time and now feels better and thinks maybe he is going to get well.

That wasn't exactly the look on the Boss's face when he came in, but it gives some idea of what that look was. He wasn't really pale, but he was paler than usual, and the flesh seemed to hang a little loose at the jawbone. There were a couple of razor nicks along the bone. Under his eyes were grey circles, as though the flesh had been bruised but was just about well now. But the eyes were clear.

He had come across the reception room without making any noise on the thick carpet, and for an instant he stood in the doorway of the office before anybody noticed his arrival. The chatter didn't die; it was frozen in mid-syllable. Then there was a kind of noiseless scurry and fumble to adjust the funeral faces which had been laid aside. Then, with the faces in place and only a little askew, they crowded around the Boss and shook his hand. They told him they wanted to tell him how they felt. "You know how us boys all feel, Boss," they said. He said, yes, he knew, very quietly. He said, yes, yes, and thank you.

Then he moved toward the desk, the boys falling away from him like water from the prow of a ship when it is first warped out from the pier and the screw makes the first revolutions. He stood before the desk, handling the telegrams, looking at them, letting them drop.