It was just three days later that Jane Ray, coming in from the shop, saw Cary sling that pen--hurriedly capped for the purpose--clear across the table, at which for those three days he had been writing almost steadily. He threw up his arms in a gesture of mingled fatigue and triumph.
“Janey,” he said, “I want you to send for Robert Black, and Doctor and Mrs. Burns, and your friend Miss Lockhart--you told me she wrote plays at college, didn’t you?--and her friend, Miss Fitch, the raving beauty who acts--probably acts all the time, but none the worse for that, for my purpose. Also, Tommy Lockhart. I want ’em all, and I want ’em quick. I can’t sleep till I’ve had ’em here to listen to what I’ve done. And now--if I weren’t under your roof, and if I didn’t care such a blamed lot about not letting Black down--I’d go out and take a drink. Oh, don’t worry--I won’t--not just yet, anyhow. I’ll go out and take a walk instead. My head’s on fire and my feet are two chunks from the North Pole.”
Happier than she had been for a long time, her hopes for her brother rising higher than they had yet dared to rise, in spite of all the encouragement his improvement had given her, Jane made haste to summon these people whose presence he had demanded. They came on short notice; even Red, who said at first that he couldn’t make it by any possible chance, electrified them all and made Cary’s pale cheek glow with satisfaction when at the last minute he appeared.
“Confound you, who are you to interfere with my schedule?” Red growled, as he shook hands. “I was due at a Medical Society Meeting, where I was booked as leader of a discussion. They’ll discuss the thing to tatters without me, while I could have rounded ’em up and driven ’em into the corral with one big discovery that they’re not onto yet.”
“Mighty sorry, Doctor. But, you see, I had to have you.” Cary grinned at him impudently. “I’ve been raving crazy for three days and nights, and if I can’t call in medical aid on the strength of that---- Oh, I know I’m mighty presumptuous, but--well--listen, and I’ll try to justify myself.”
They listened for an hour. They could hardly help it. As a down-and-outer Cary Ray had been an object of solicitude and sympathy; as a clever, forceful, intensely yet restrainedly dramatic playwright, he was a person to astonish and take his new acquaintances off their feet. Stirred as he had been, gripped by the big idea Black had unknowingly put into his head, he had gone at this task as he had time and again gone at a difficult piece of newspaper work. With every faculty alert, every sense of the dramatic possibilities of the conception stringing him to a tension, his thoughts thronging, his language fluid, his whole being had been sharpened into an instrument which his brain, the master, might command to powerful purpose. Thus had he written the one-act war play which was to fire the imagination, enlist the sympathies, capture the hearts of thousands of those who later saw it put upon the vaudeville circuit, where its influence, cumulative as the fame of it spread and the press comments grew in wonder and praise, was accountable for many a patriotic word and act which otherwise never had been born.