Then he said, solemnly:  “Listen.  If you go out now, you leave me in the lurch, with nothin’ on God’s green earth to depend on but your brother —­and you know what he is.  I’ve depended on you for it all since Jim died.  Now you’ve listened to that dam’ doctor, and he says maybe you won’t ever be as good a man as you were, and that certainly you won’t be for a year or so—­probably more.  Now, that’s all a lie.  Men don’t break down that way at your age.  Look at me!  And I tell you, you can shake this thing off.  All you need is a little get-up and a little gumption.  Men don’t go away for years and then come back into moving businesses like ours—­they lose the strings.  And if you could, I won’t let you—­if you lay down on me now, I won’t—­and that’s because if you lay down you prove you ain’t the man I thought you were.”  He cleared his throat and finished quietly:  “Roscoe, will you take a month’s vacation and come back and go to it?”

“No,” said Roscoe, listlessly.  “I’m through.”

“All right,” said Sheridan.  He picked up the evening paper from a table, went to a chair by the fire and sat down, his back to his son.  “Good-by.”

Roscoe rose, his head hanging, but there was a dull relief in his eyes.  “Best I can do,” he muttered, seeming about to depart, yet lingering.  “I figure it out a good deal like this,” he said.  “I didn’t know my job was any strain, and I managed all right, but from what Gur—­from what I hear, I was just up to the limit of my nerves from overwork, and the—­the trouble at home was the extra strain that’s fixed me the way I am.  I tried to brace, so I could stand the work and the trouble too, on whiskey—­and that put the finish to me!  I—­I’m not hitting it as hard as I was for a while, and I reckon pretty soon, if I can get to feeling a little more energy, I better try to quit entirely—­I don’t know.  I’m all in—­and the doctor says so.  I thought I was running along fine up to a few months ago, but all the time I was ready to bust, and didn’t know it.  Now, then, I don’t want you to blame Sibyl, and if I were you I wouldn’t speak of her as ‘that woman,’ because she’s your daughter-in-law and going to stay that way.  She didn’t do anything wicked.  It was a shock to me, and I don’t deny it, to find what she had done—­encouraging that fellow to hang around her after he began trying to flirt with her, and losing her head over him the way she did.  I don’t deny it was a shock and that it’ll always be a hurt inside of me I’ll never get over.  But it was my fault; I didn’t understand a woman’s nature.”  Poor Roscoe spoke in the most profound and desolate earnest.  “A woman craves society, and gaiety, and meeting attractive people, and traveling.  Well, I can’t give her the other things, but I can give her the traveling—­real traveling, not just going to Atlantic City or New Orleans, the way she has, two, three times.  A woman has to have something in her life besides a