II
It was opened a few inches by Mostyn Scarth. His raiment was still at concert pitch, but his face even darker than it had been as the crime doctor saw it last.
"May I ask who you are and what you want?" he demanded—not at all in the manner of Mr. Jingle—rather in the voice that most people would have raised.
"My name's Dollar and I'm a doctor."
The self-announcement, pat as a polysyllable, had a foreseen effect only minimized by the precautionary confidence of Doctor Dollar's manner.
"Thanks very much. I've had about enough of doctors."
And the door was shutting when the intruder got in a word like a wedge.
"Exactly!"
Scarth frowned through a chink just wide enough to show both his eyes. It was the intruder's tone that held his hand.
"What does that mean?" he demanded with more control.
"That I want to see you about the other doctor—this German fellow," returned Dollar, against the grain. But the studious phrase admitted him.
"Well, don't raise your voice," said Scarth, lowering his own as he shut the door softly behind them. "I believe I saw you down-stairs outside the bar. So I need only explain that I've just got my bright young man off to sleep, on the other side of those folding-doors."
Dollar could not help wondering whether the other room was as good as Scarth's, which was much bigger and better appointed than his own. But he sat down at the oval table under the electrolier, and came abruptly to his point.
"About that prescription," he began, and straightway produced it from his pocket.
"Well, what about it?" the other queried, but only keenly, as he sat down at the table, too.
"Doctor Alt is a very old friend of mine, Mr. Scarth."
Mostyn Scarth exhibited the slight but immediate change of front due from gentleman to gentleman on the strength of such a statement. His grim eyes softened with a certain sympathy; but the accession left his gravity the more pronounced.
"He is not only a friend," continued Dollar, "but the cleverest and best man I know in my profession. I don't speak from mere loyalty; he was my own doctor before he was my friend. Mr. Scarth, he saved more than my life when every head in Harley Street had been shaken over my case. All the baronets gave me up; but chance or fate brought me here, and this little unknown man performed the miracle they shirked, and made a new man of me off his own bat. I wanted him to come to London and make his fortune; but his work was here, he wouldn't leave it; and here I find him under a sorry cloud. Can you wonder at my wanting to step in and speak up for him, Mr. Scarth?"
"On the contrary, I know exactly how you must feel, and am very glad you have spoken," rejoined Mostyn Scarth, cordially enough in all the circumstances of the case. "But the cloud is none of my making, Doctor Dollar, though I naturally feel rather strongly about the matter. But for Schickel, the chemist, I might be seeing a coffin to England at this moment! He's the man who found out the mistake, and has since made all the mischief."
"Are you sure it was a mistake, Mr. Scarth?" asked Dollar quietly.
"What else?" cried the other, in blank astonishment. "Even Schickel has never suggested that Doctor Alt was trying to commit a murder!"
"Even Schickel!" repeated Dollar, with a sharp significance. "Are you suggesting that there's no love lost between him and Alt?"
"I was not, indeed." Scarth seemed still astonished. "No. That never occurred to me for a moment."
"Yet it's a small place, and you know what small places are. Would one man be likely to spread a thing like this against another if there were no bad blood between them?"
Scarth could not say. The thing happened to be true, and it made such a justifiable sensation. He was none the less frankly interested in the suggestion. It was as though he had a tantalizing glimmer of the crime doctor's meaning. Their heads were closer together across the end of the table, their eyes joined in mutual probation.
"Can I trust you with my own idea, Mr. Scarth?"
"That's for you to decide, Doctor Dollar."
"I shall not breathe it to another soul—not even to Alt himself—till I am sure."
"You may trust me, doctor. I don't know what's coming, but I shan't give it away."
"Then I shall trust you even to the extent of contradicting what I just said. I am sure—between ourselves—that the prescription now in my hands is a clever forgery!"
Scarth held out his hand for it. A less deliberate announcement might have given him a more satisfactory surprise; but he could not have looked more incredulous than he did, or subjected Dollar to a cooler scrutiny.
"A forgery with what object, Doctor Dollar?"
"That I don't pretend to say. I merely state the fact—in confidence. You have your eyes upon a flagrant forgery."
Scarth raised them twinkling. "My dear Doctor Dollar, I saw him write it out myself!"
"Are you quite sure?"
"Absolutely, doctor! This lad, Jack Laverick, is a pretty handful; without a doctor to frighten him from time to time, I couldn't cope with him at all. His people are in despair about him—but that's another matter. I was only going to say that I took him to Doctor Alt myself, and this is the prescription they refused to make up. Schickel may have a spite against Alt, as you suggest, but if he's a forger I can only say he doesn't look the part."
"The only looks I go by," said the crime doctor, "are those of the little document in your hand."
"It's on Alt's paper."
"Anybody could get hold of that."
"But you suggest that Alt and Schickel have been on bad terms?"
"That's a better point, Mr. Scarth, that's a much better point," said Dollar, smiling and then ceasing to smile as he produced a magnifying-lens. "Allow me to switch on the electric standard, and do me the favor of examining that handwriting with this loop; it's not very strong, but the best I could get here at the photographer's shop."
"It's certainly not strong enough to show anything fishy, to my inexperience," said Scarth, on a sufficiently close inspection.
"Now look at this one."
Dollar had produced a second prescription from the same pocket as before. At first sight they seemed identical.
"Is this another forgery?" inquired Scarth, with a first faint trace of irony.
"No. That's the correct prescription, rewritten by Alt at my request, as he is positive he wrote it originally."
"I see now. There are two more noughts mixed up with the other hieroglyphs."
"They happen to make all the difference between life and death," said Dollar gravely. "Yet they are not by any means the only difference here."
"I can see no other, I must confess." And Scarth raised his eyes just as Dollar's fell from his broad brown brow.
"The other difference is, Mr. Scarth, that the prescription with the strychnine in deadly decigrams has been drawn backward instead of being written forward."
Scarth's stare ended in a smile.
"Do you mind saying all that again, Doctor Dollar?"
"I'll elaborate it. The genuine prescription has been written in the ordinary way—currente calamo. But forgeries are not written in the ordinary way, much less with running pens; the best of them are written backward, or rather they are drawn upside down. Try to copy writing as writing, and your own will automatically creep in and spoil it; draw it upside down and wrong way on, as a mere meaningless scroll, and your own formation of the letters doesn't influence you, because you are not forming letters at all. You are drawing from a copy, Mr. Scarth."
"You mean that I'm deriving valuable information from a handwriting expert," cried Scarth, with another laugh.
"There are no such experts," returned Dollar, a little coldly. "It's all a mere matter of observation, open to everybody with eyes to see. But this happens to be an old forger's trick; try it for yourself, as I have, and you'll be surprised to see how much there is in it."
"I must," said Scarth. "But I can't conceive how you can tell that it has been played in this case."
"No? Look at the start, 'Herr Laverick,' and at the finish, 'Doctor Alt.' You would expect to see plenty of ink in the 'Herr,' wouldn't you? Still plenty in the 'Laverick,' I think, but now less and less until the pen is filled again. In the correct prescription, written at my request to-day, you will find that this is so. In the forgery the progression is precisely the reverse; the t in 'Alt' is full of ink, but you will find less and less till the next dip in the middle of the word 'Mahlzeit' in the line above. The forger, of course, dips oftener than the man with the running pen."
Scarth bent in silence over the lens, his dark face screwed awry. Suddenly he pushed back his chair.
"It's wonderful!" he cried softly. "I see everything you say. Doctor Dollar, you have converted me completely to your view. I should like you to allow me to convert the hotel."
"Not yet," said Dollar, rising, "if at all as to the actual facts of the case. It's no use making bad worse, Mr. Scarth, or taking a dirty trick too seriously. It isn't as though the forgery had been committed with a view to murdering your young Laverick."
"I never dreamed of thinking that it was!"
"You are quite right, Mr. Scarth. It doesn't bear thinking about. Of course, any murderer ingenious enough to concoct such a thing would have been far too clever to drop out two noughts; he would have been content to change the milligrams into centigrams, and risk a recovery. No sane chemist would have dispensed the pills in decimals. But we are getting off the facts, and I promised to meet Doctor Alt on his last round. If I may tell him, in vague terms, that you at least think there may have been some mistake, other than the culpable one that has been laid at his door, I shall go away less uneasy about my unwarrantable intrusion than I can assure you I was in making it."
It was strange how the balance of personality had shifted during an interview which Scarth himself was now eager to extend. He had no longer the mesmeric martinet who had tamed an unruly audience at sight; the last of Mr. Jingle's snap had long been in abeyance. And yet there was just one more suggestion of that immortal, in the rather dilapidated trunk from which the swarthy exquisite now produced a bottle of whisky, very properly locked up out of Laverick's reach. And weakness of will could not be imputed to the young man who induced John Dollar to cement their acquaintance with a thimbleful.