"What do you think of Patten?" he asked.
Startled by his abruptness, characteristic of him though it was to-day, she asked in puzzled fashion:
"What do you mean?"
"Not as a man," he said, withdrawing his gaze from the sunset and bestowing it gravely upon her. "As a physician. Do you size him up as capable or as something of a quack?"
She hesitated. But finally she made the only reply possible.
"Of course you don't expect any answer, knowing that you should not come to one member of a profession for an estimate of another. And, besides, you realize that I know nothing whatever of Dr. Patten, either as a man or as a physician."
He laughed softly.
"Hedging, pure, unadulterated hedging! I didn't look for that from you. Shall I tell you what we both think of him? He is a farce and a fake, and I rather think that I am going to run him out of the State pretty soon. . . . What would you say of a doctor who couldn't tell the difference between a wound made by a man bumping his head when he fell and by a smashing blow with a gun-barrel? Patten doesn't guess yet that it was the blow Moraga gave me the other night which came so close to ringing down the sable curtains for me."
"Moraga?" she asked with quickened interest. "Not the same Moraga who shot Brocky Lane?"
"The same little old Moraga," he assured her lightly. "You needn't mention it abroad, of course; I don't think Galloway got a chance to talk with him and we are not sure yet that he even knows Moraga was here. But I know somebody put me out in the dark by hammering me over the head; and Tom Cutter found blood on Moraga's revolver. But we wander far afield. Coming back to Patten, do we agree that he is something of a dub?"