Tall beyond the average and gaunt almost to the point of emaciation; frock coated like a senator of the Eighties; thin shoulders seeming bowed by the weight of the garments hung thereon; enormous, heavily veined hands carried as if hooked onto invisible hinges behind the stained white cuffs:—this the superficial aspect of Dr. Stooder. Vital character of the man was all summed up in his face: skin like wrinkled vellum stretched on a rack; eyes glinting from deep caves on either side of a veritable crag of a nose which had been broken and skewed off the true. A great mane of grey hair reared up and back from his high forehead; tufts of the same colour on lip and chin in the ancient mode of the “Imperial” added the last daguerreotype touch to his features.
Black eyes roved the room and fell on Grant, who had risen. The doctor crooked a bony finger at him and he passed through into the private office, taking the seat indicated. Without paying his visitor the least heed, Dr. Stooder went to a closet, poured two fingers of some white liquid into a graduating glass and drank it. His lips smacked like a pistol shot. Then he returned and took a swivel chair before a very shabby and littered desk.
“I never seen you before, sah”—the man’s accent reeked of Texas, the old Texas before the oil invasions. “So I’ll answer the question every stranger’s just mortal dying to ask and don’t dare. How’d I come to get this scar?” The surprising doctor tilted his great head back and traced with his fore-finger an angry weal which encircled his throat like a collar gall. “Well, sah, I was informally hanged once—and cut down. Now we can get down to business. What’s your symptoms?”
Grant, caught off balance by so unconventional a reception, stammered that he had no symptoms.
“My friend, Bim Bagley, who is out of town for a few days, told me to look you up. My name is Grant Hickman. I’m from New York.” The black eyes, never deviating from their disconcerting stare, showed no flicker of recognition at the name.
“What you want of me if you have no symptoms?” abruptly in the doctor’s nasal bray. “I’m not in the market for the World’s Library of Wit and Humour. I’ll cut you for a tumour or dose you for dyspepsia; but I won’t buy a book.”
“I have no books to sell.” Grant found his temperature rising. “I have come out from New York because you told my friend Bagley to send for me.”
Doc Stooder suddenly snapped out of his chair like a yard rule unfolding and strode to the closet. With bottle and graduating glass poised he bent a severe eye upon his visitor.
“You say you don’t drink. Highly commendable. I do.” Again the pistol shot from satisfied lips. He replaced the bottle and tucked his hands under the tails of his coat where they flapped the sleazy garment restlessly.