Squatting together in the dim light from the hall lamp that was always left burning all night, they suddenly remembered that they had started to run away and immediately began to discuss the question of ways and means.
Papa Doctor’s big, fur-lined coat, that he always wore when going out to night calls during the severe weather, hung on the hat rack, and the cubs knew that its side-pockets were huge and that a Teddy bear might easily find refuge therein.
While they were deliberating whether or no to seize this method of escape from the house, their decision was hastened by the sound of the telephone ringing furiously.
It was a call for Papa Doctor and in a moment he was heard hurrying about in the room overhead as he sprang into his clothes.
The cubs hesitated no longer, but swarming up the sides of the greatcoat they dove one into each pocket, and lay there quaking with fright as Papa Doctor came running downstairs, hastily struggled into his coat, pulled his sealskin cap down over his ears and hurried away, pulling on his gloves as he went.
Whither lay his route the cubs, of course, were unable to divine. They rode for some distance in a street car and then there was a short walk, a run up a flight of steps and Papa Doctor was ringing the bell at the door of a cheap apartment house, a fact which the cubs discovered by poking their heads one out of each pocket. They grinned at the thought of how astonished the doctor would be could he know what he was carrying along with his pills and powders. But they quickly subsided as the front door swung open all by itself, a habit that the front doors of flat houses usually follow, and the doctor ran quickly upstairs, up and up and up five flights to the very top.
Here a light streamed into the hall from an open door and an anxious, white-faced woman ran to meet him. And while he divested himself of his heavy outer garments and went to work over a dangerous attack of croup, the twins slid warily each out of his respective pocket and slipped, trembling, to their usual refuge under the bed.
Finally, after an hour’s hard work, the little patient was left in a satisfactory condition, Dr. North promising to return early next morning, and after a little, all preparations for the night were concluded and quiet reigned in the little flat.