“I thought he was dead when I saw him go down like he was sandbagged,” said the boy. “He lives just around the corner in Amsterdam Avenue—at least his wife lives there.”
The doctor took the address, and with the aid of the policeman he put the body on the stretcher and lifted it into the ambulance. The driver protested against this as unprecedented.
“Sure it’s none of our business to take a stiff home!” he declared. “That’s no work at all, at all, for an ambulance. Dr. Chandler never done the like in all the months him an’ me was together. Begob, I never contracted to drive hearses.”
The young Southerner explained that this procedure might not be regular, but it revolted him to leave the body of a fellow-mortal lying where it had fallen on the floor of a shop. The least he could do, so it seemed to him, was to take it to the dead man’s widow, especially since this was scarcely a block out of their way as they returned to the hospital.
The driver kept on grumbling as they drove off. “Sure he give ye no chance at all, at all, Doctor, to go and croak afore iver ye got at him, and you only beginnin’ yer work! Dr. Chandler, now, he’d get ‘em into the wagon ennyway, an’ take chances of there bein’ breath in ‘em. Three times, divil a less, they died on us on the stretcher there, an’ me whippin' like the divil to get ’sem into the hospital ennyhow, where it was their own consarn whether they lived or died. That’s the place for ‘em to die in, an’ not in the wagon; but the wagon’s better than dyin‘s before we can get to ‘em, an’ the divil thank the begrudgers! It’s unlucky, so it is; an’ by the same token, to-day’s Friday, so it is!”
The small boy who had identified the dead man ran alongside of them, accompanied by his admiring mates; and when the ambulance backed up again before a pretentious tenement-house with a brownstone front and beveled plate-glass doors, the small boy rang Mrs. McEcchran’s bell.
“It’s the third floor she lives on,” he declared.
The janitor came up from the basement and he and the driver carried the stretcher up to Mrs. McEcchran’s landing.
The doctor went up before them, and found an insignificant little old woman waiting for him on the landing.
“Is this Mrs. McEcchran?” he asked.