"A Day's Wait"

In "A Day's Wait," a young boy is very ill with a fever. When the doctor comes to check him out, he tells the boy that his fever has gone up to one hundred and two degrees. This worries the young boy, and he tells his father that he didn't have to stay by his side if it was going to bother him. Telling him this, the boy confuses his father. The father keeps telling the boy to go back to sleep, but the boy insists on staying awake.
Later that day, the father goes out hunting for quail. Shooting only two and missing five, he calls it a day. He leaves satisfied because he realizes that there are many quail left for hunting on another day.
While the father is gone, the boy doesn't let anyone in his room because he is afraid that his family will catch what he has. The father takes the boy's temperature when he gets back to the house, and it is still one hundred and two degrees, just like the doctor had said. The boy suddenly becomes more worried than before and doesn't see how his medicine could possibly help him anymore. He asks his father how long it is going to be before he dies because the kids in France said that you can't live with a temperature of fourty-four degrees. The father tells him that there is a huge difference in the thermometers, and the boy is relieved.