Outside, through the open front doors, the crickets chirped.
Meredith went out on the steps, and breathed the cool night air.

A slender taint of drugs hung everywhere about the building, and the almost imperceptible permeation sickened him; it was deadly, he thought, and imbued with a hideous portent of suffering.

That John Harkless, of all men, should lie stifled with ether, and bandaged and splintered, and smeared with horrible unguents, while they stabbed and slashed and tortured him, and made an outrage and a sin of that grand, big, dexterous body of his! Meredith shuddered.

The lights in the little ward were turned up, and they seemed to shine from a chamber of horrors, while he waited, as a brother might have waited outside the Inquisition--if, indeed, a brother would have been allowed to wait outside the Inquisition.
Alas, he had found John Harkless! He had "lost track" of him as men sometimes do lose track of their best beloved, but it had always been a comfort to know that Harkless _was_--somewhere, a comfort without which he could hardly have got along.

Like others he had been waiting for John to turn up--on top, of course; for people would always believe in him so, that he would be shoved ahead, no matter how much he hung back himself--but Meredith had not expected him to turn up in Indiana.