CHAPTER XIII
A GREAT GASH
“CONFOUND you—pay some attention to me, will you? Do you get what I’m saying? Everything’s in train. I’ve only to take my physical examination—papers came this morning, by the way—and get my passports, and I’m off. For the love of heaven, what’s the matter with you, Max Buller? Sitting there looking like a mollusc—like a barnacle glued to a rock—and me having transports all over the place! Don’t you know a magnificently happy man when you see one—and can’t you——”
Red’s manner suddenly changed, as Dr. Maxwell Buller looked up at him with an expression of mingled pain and protest. Red’s voice softened, his smiling lips grew sober.
“I beg your pardon, Max, old man,” he said. “You’re in trouble, and I’m a blind ass—as usual. What’s the matter? The Throckmorton case gone wrong, after all? Or worse things befallen? Come—out with it!”
Buller got up. He was Burns’ best friend in the profession—the two had stood together since the earliest days of medical school and hospital training. Buller was not a brilliant member of the healing fraternity, but a steady-going, conscientious, doggedly energetic practitioner on whose sturdy friendship through all the thick and thin of the regular grind Burns was accustomed to rely. Never a crisis in the professional affairs of either man but he called with confidence upon the bed-rock reliability of the other to see him through.
On this particular morning, Red, bursting with the latest developments in the arrangements he was pushing through in order to be able to get away and join Dr. John Leaver at an American hospital in France, had rushed into Buller’s office considerably before office hours. He had shouted his plans into the other’s ears—so to speak—though technically he had not much raised his voice above its customary low professional pitch. The whole effect of him, none the less, had been that of a boy roaring at a comrade across several fences that he had been given a holiday and was off for glorious sport. And here was his trusty comrade-in-arms glowering gloomily back at him and as good as saying that he grudged him his luck and hoped he’d have the worst possible time of it. That wasn’t a bit like Buller—good old Buller, who hadn’t a selfish hair on his head, and knew no such thing as professional jealousy where R. P. Burns was concerned. What in the name of time was the matter with him?
“I’d no idea,” said Buller, at last, and hesitating strangely, “the thing had gone so far. I knew you thought of going, but——”
“But what? Haven’t I been talking going for the last year and a half? And didn’t I call you up the other day when I got Jack Leaver’s cable and tell you I meant to put it through post-haste? Didn’t I——”
“Yes, you’ve told me all about it. You’ll remember that I’ve said a good deal about the need for you right here, and my hope that you’d delay going a while yet. I think I said——”
“I don’t know what you said,” Red broke in impatiently, interrupting Buller’s slower speech in a way to which the other was well used. “I was much too busy talking myself to notice what any idiot might be saying on lines like those. Good Lord! man, you knew I’d go the minute I got the chance. Why, I’m needed over there about sixteen thousand times more than I am here——”