“No use waiting here, Percy,” said Ralph, as the surgeon vanished.
Percy looked around the bare office. A desk, a telephone, and a long row of dismal, precise-looking chairs were its sole ornaments. A smell of disinfectants hung heavily in the air. Behind the desk a small man with a closely cropped head, and very neat, well-brushed clothes, was writing in a big book, a supply of spare pens held behind his ears on either side of his shiny skull.
Suddenly the telephone jangled harshly. The man jumped up and went to it. The boys, half unconsciously, paused.
“Hello,” they heard the little man say in snappish, peeved tones, “hel-lo. Yes-yes-yes. This is the Mercy Hospital. Yes, I said. Yes-yes-yes. A boy? A boy wounded in the forehead? Concussion case? Yes, we have such a case here.”
The boys exchanged glances. There appeared to be hardly a doubt but that some one at the other end of the wire was calling up about “their boy.”
The conversation to which they were auditors at one end only continued.
“Who is this?—Who?—Say it again.—Malvern?—No?—Speak louder, can’t you? Oh, Malvin. Yes——”
“Great Scott!”
The exclamation fairly leaped from Ralph’s lips.
The busy little man looked around angrily.