For the first time since she had come into the room her speech came spontaneously.
“I ... I ... was boiling the syringe and had my back to the corridor door, and suddenly I felt someone passing in the corridor and turned around, and ran to the medicine closet door. There was no one in sight. And then I remembered the boiling syringe and went back to turn it off. I couldn’t leave until I had. It would have been ruined, and if the patient didn’t get her dose in time she might die.
“So I made myself finish filling the syringe and then went into the ward. There was nobody there, and all of the patients were sleeping, except Mrs. Witherspoon, who is queer in the head.
“I asked her if she had seen anybody and she said, ‘Yes.’”
The girl’s speech died in her throat and the seven men held their breath.
MacArthur regained his first.
“Whom did she say she saw, Miss Kerr?”
“She said she saw Dr. ... Dr. ... Sterling ... Junior....”
The girl turned her close-set eyes, acid with hate, upon Cub Sterling. Princeton’s lavender eyes, death-purple, Prissy’s green ones glinting, Hoffbein’s black ones deep as wells and the brown eyes of Doctors Barton and Harrison, gravely inquiring, turned upon Cub Sterling.
Only Dr. MacArthur’s eyes remained the same.