Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish
clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in
Moonstone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug store.
Larry, the doctor’s man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-room
and the double student’s lamp on the desk in the study. The isinglass
sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow, and the air in the study was
so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little
operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting room was carpeted
and stiffly furnished, something like a country parlor. The study had
worn, unpainted floors, but there was a look of winter comfort about it.
The doctor’s flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in
orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide bookcase,
with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the ceiling. It was
filled with medical books of every thickness and color. On the top shelf
stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark
mottled board covers, with imitation leather backs.
As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially old, so the doctor
in small Colorado towns twenty-five years ago was generally young.
Dr. Archie was barely thirty. He was tall, with massive shoulders
which he held stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a
distinguished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.
There was something individual in the way in which his reddish-brown
hair, parted cleanly at the side, bushed over his high forehead. His
nose was straight and thick, and his eyes were intelligent. He wore a
curly, reddish mustache and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look
a little like the pictures of Napoleon III. His hands were large and
well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded with crinkly
reddish hair. He wore a blue suit of woolly, wide-waled serge; the
traveling men had known at a glance that it was made by a Denver tailor.
The doctor was always well dressed.
Dr. Archie turned up the student’s lamp and sat down in the swivel chair
before his desk. He sat uneasily, beating a tattoo on his knees with his
fingers, and looked about him as if he were bored. He glanced at his
watch, then absently took from his pocket a bunch of small keys,
selected one and looked at it. A contemptuous smile, barely perceptible,
played on his lips, but his eyes remained meditative. Behind the door
that led into the hall, under his buffalo-skin driving-coat, was a locked
cupboard. This the doctor opened mechanically, kicking aside a pile of
muddy overshoes. Inside, on the shelves, were whiskey glasses and
decanters, lemons, sugar, and bitters. Hearing a step in the empty,
echoing hall without, the doctor closed the cupboard again, snapping the
Yale lock. The door of the waiting-room opened, a man entered and came
on into the consulting-room.
“Good-evening, Mr. Kronborg,” said the doctor carelessly. “Sit down.”
His visitor was a tall, loosely built man, with a thin brown beard,
streaked with gray. He wore a frock coat, a broad-brimmed black hat, a
white lawn necktie, and steel rimmed spectacles. Altogether there was a
pretentious and important air about him, as he lifted the skirts of his
coat and sat down.
“Good-evening, doctor. Can you step around to the house with me? I think
