Within half an hour the distinguished physician arrived. He was a cheerful, clean-shaven, well-dressed man of perhaps forty-five, and looked extremely awake, considering the hour. Mauney showed him upstairs to his room and introduced him to the patient.
“How do you do?” said Dr. Adamson, pleasantly, as he took Stalton’s proffered hand. “Are you in trouble?”
“I feel as if there was a mud-turtle inside my stomach, doctor, trying to land on the edge of my liver,” confessed Stalton.
Adamson laughed as he drew up a chair, and sat down leisurely beside the bed.
“Well,” he said, in his cheerful way, “your description lacks nothing in vividness. Do you think he will manage to land?”
Stalton put his palm over the pit of his stomach.
“Right there,” he said.
“Pain?” queried Adamson.
“It isn’t exactly pain, doctor. It’s an all-gone feeling. If it would only pain I’d know where I stood. But it really doesn’t pain—it’s just sort of churning.”