“'Tain’t any my business as I know of,” he began, apologetically, “but I can’t help lookin’ at that arm o’ your’n, and wonderin’ what made it so. I had my fortune told onc’t by a man who had an arm like that, and he said a tiger bit it. He was an East Injun, er a Malay, I reckon. It come to me that you might have met with an accident sometime, er somethin’ er 'nuther? There’s a story about it, I reckon?”
The blood rushed in a wave to Clayton’s face and appeared to suffuse even his dark eyes. He did not answer the question, being sensitive on the subject, and deeming it an impertinence.
Sanders waited a time, while Fogg talked; then he returned to his inquiry, with even greater emphasis.
“Yes, there is a story,” said Clayton, speaking slowly, after a moment of hesitation, while a ghastly smile took the attractiveness out of his thoughtful countenance. “It wasn’t an accident, though.”
“No?” said Sanders.
“The thing was done in cool deliberation. I was in college, in a medical college, for I’m a doctor you know. I was a student then; and it was the custom among the students to perform various operations on each other, by way of practice, so that when we went out from there to begin our work we would know how things should be done. One day I sawed a student’s skull open, took out a spoonful of his brains, and sewed the wound up so nicely that he was well in a week. The operation was a great success, but I dipped a little too deep and took out too much of the gray matter, and after that he was always omitting something or other that he should have remembered. In return for what he had permitted me to do he put me on the operating table one day, broke my arm with a mallet, and then proceeded to put it together again. In doing so he omitted the funny bone, and my arm has been this way ever since.”
Fogg broke into a roar of laughter. Sanders flushed slowly; and getting up walked to the other end of the room, chewing wrathfully, splintering the story with his teeth as he splintered the grass blades that he plucked and chewed when walking about to view the valley land.
“Huh!” he grunted, coming back and dropping lumpily into his chair. “Tell that to a fool an’ mebbe you’ll git a fool to believe ye, but I don’t!”
Fogg slapped his fat knee and roared again.
“Ha, ha! Ho, ho! Ask him something else, Sanders! Who-ee! Doc, I didn’t think it was in you! If you do anything like that again I’ll have to let a reef out of the band of my trousers. Fire another question at him, Sanders.”