The After House

An Excerpt from the book-

I PLAN A VOYAGE


By the bequest of an elder brother, I was left enough money to see me
through a small college in Ohio, and to secure me four years in a
medical school in the East. Why I chose medicine I hardly know.
Possibly the career of a surgeon attracted the adventurous element in
me. Perhaps, coming of a family of doctors, I merely followed the line
of least resistance. It may be, indirectly but inevitably, that I
might be on the yacht Ella on that terrible night of August 12, more
than a year ago.

I got through somehow. I played quarterback on the football team, and
made some money coaching. In summer I did whatever came to hand, from
chartering a sail-boat at a summer resort and taking passengers, at so
much a head, to checking up cucumbers in Indiana for a Western pickle
house.

I was practically alone. Commencement left me with a diploma, a new
dress-suit, an out-of-date medical library, a box of surgical
instruments of the same date as the books, and an incipient case of
typhoid fever.

I was twenty-four, six feet tall, and forty inches around the chest.
Also, I had lived clean, and worked and played hard. I got over the
fever finally, pretty much all bone and appetite; but--alive. Thanks to
the college, my hospital care had cost nothing. It was a good thing: I
had just seven dollars in the world.