“The man who told you was a liar, that’s all. This ain’t Martin Carroll, and the sooner you take him away the better. That’s what I say,” declared the saloon-keeper, going back to his work.
The doctor looked around in disgust. What he had to do now was to take the body to the morgue, and that revolted him. It seemed to him an insult to the dead and an outrage toward the dead man’s family. Yet he had no other course of action open to him, and he was beginning to be impatient to have done with the thing. The week of hot weather had worn on his nerves also, and he wanted to be back again in the cool hospital out of the oven of the streets.
As he and the driver were about to lift up the stretcher again, a man in overalls stepped up to the body and looked at it attentively.
“It’s Dick O’Donough!” he said at once. “Poor old Dick! It’s a sad day for her—and her that excitable!”
“Do you know him?” asked the doctor.
“Don’t I?” returned the man in overalls, a thin, elderly man, with wisps of hair beneath his chin and a shrewd, weazened face. “It’s Dick O’Donough!”
“But are you sure of it?” the young surgeon insisted. “We’ve had two mistakes already.”
“Sure of it?” repeated the other. “Of course I’m sure of it! Didn’t I work alongside of him for five years? And isn’t that the scar on him he got when the wheel broke?” And he lifted the dead man’s hair and showed a cicatrix on the temple.
“Very well,” said the doctor. “If you are sure, where did he live?”