Dr. Hoffman arrived the next day.
"Vell, vell, Missis Sahvah," he said anxiously as he saw her lying so ominously still on the bed, "you haf not been trying to push somevon across de top of Lake Erie, haf you?" Sahwah smiled faintly. A ray of sunlight seemed to have entered the room with the doctor, also a gust of wind. He had thrown his hat right into a bouquet of flowers and his hair stood on end and his tie was askew with the haste he had made in getting to the hospital from the train. "Now about this hip, yes?" he said in a businesslike tone. Without any ceremony he brushed the nurse aside and unwrapped the bandages. "Ach so," he said, feeling of the joint with a practised hand, "you did a good job, Missis Sahvah. You make out of your bone a splinter. But vot is dis I hear about operating?" he suddenly exclaimed. "De very idea! Don't you let dem amputate your leg off! Such fool doctors! It's a vonder dey did not cut your head off to cure de bump!" His voice rose to a regular roar. Dr. Lord, coming in at that moment, stopped in astonishment at the sight of this strange doctor standing over his patient. "For vy did you want to amputate her leg off?" shouted Dr. Hoffman at him, dancing up and down in front of him and shaking his finger under his nose. "It is no more diseased dan yours is. And you call yourself a surgeon doctor! Bah! You go out and play in de sunshine and let me take care of dis hip."
"Who the dickens are you?" asked Dr. Lord, looking at him as though he thought he were an escaped lunatic.
"Dis is who I am," replied Dr. Hoffman, handing him a card. "I vas in eighteen-ninety-five by de Staatsklinick in Berlin." Dr. Lord fell back respectfully.
"I know someting about dot Missis Sahvah's bones," went on Dr. Hoffman, "and I know dey vill knit if you gif dem a chance. If all goes vell she vill valk again in t'ree months."
"I'd like to see you do it," said Dr. Lord.
"Patience, my friend," said Dr. Hoffman, "first ve make a little plaster cast." When Mrs. Brewster came in the afternoon she found a strange doctor in command and Dr. Lord and the nurses obeying his orders as if hypnotized. When she went home that night, hope had come to life again in her heart, where it had been dead for more than a week. Dr. Hoffman spent the afternoon having X-ray photographs of the joint made, and sat up all night trying to figure out how those bones could be set so they would knit and still not leave the joint stiff. By morning he had the solution.
The next day—the day the limb was to have been amputated—an operation of a very different nature took place. Dr. Hoffman, looking more like a pastry cook in his operating clothes than anything else, bustled around the operating room keeping the nurses and assisting physicians on the jump.
"Who's the Dutchman that's doing the bossing?" asked a pert young interne of one of the doctors.
"Shut up," answered the doctor addressed, "that's Hoffman, of the Staatsklinick in Berlin, and the Royal College of Vienna. He was Professor of Anatomy in the Staatsklinick '95-'96, don't you remember?" he said, turning to one of the other doctors. "He's a wizard at bonesetting. He performed that operation on Count Esterhazy's youngest son that kept him from being a cripple." The younger doctor looked at Dr. Hoffman with a sudden respect. The case in question was a famous one in surgical annals.