When the ambulance started, the driver began grumbling again: “It’s not Dr. Chandler that ‘ud have a thing like this happen to him. Him an’ me never went traipsing round wid a corp that didn’t belong to nobody. We knew enough to take it where the wake was waitin'.”
The boy on the box with the driver guided the ambulance to a two-story wooden shanty with a rickety stairway outside leading up to the second floor.
He sprang down as the ambulance backed up, and he pointed out to the doctor the sign at the foot of these external steps—“Martin Carroll, Photographer.”
“That’s where he belongs,” the boy explained. “He sleeps in the gallery up there. The saloon belongs to a Dutchman that married his sister. This is the place all right, if it really is Mr. Carroll.”
“What do you mean by that?” shouted the doctor. “Are you not sure about it?”
“I ain’t certain sure,” the fellow replied. “I ain’t as sure as I was first off. But I think it’s Mr. Carroll. Leastways, if it ain’t, it looks like him!”
It was with much dissatisfaction at this doubtfulness of his guide that the doctor helped the driver slide out the stretcher.
Then the side door of the saloon under the landing of the outside stairs opened and a stocky little German came out.
“What’s this? What’s this?” he asked.
The young surgeon began his explanation again. “This is where Mr. Carroll lived, isn’t it? Well, I am sorry to say there has been an accident, and—”