“All right. I’ll leave the car and come back.”
As Peter took his chair again by his friend’s bedside his face was set to as strong a purpose as Sheila O’Leary’s had shown that day in the sanitarium grounds. “Want me to talk, old man?” he asked, quietly. “Maybe I can yarn you into forty winks. Shall I try?”
“Wish you would. It’s funny how a man can go through this with a thousand or so patients and it seems like an every-day affair, but when it’s himself—well, there’s the rub.” And the doctor smiled a bit sheepishly at his own ungovernable nerves.
Peter gripped his hand understandingly. “I know. It’s the difference between fiction and autobiography as far as it touches your own sense of reality. Well, to-night shall we try fiction? Ever since they pulled me through here, I’ve had my mind on a yarn with a sanitarium or hospital for a background and a doctor for a hero. All this atmosphere gets into your blood. It keeps you guessing until you have to spin a yarn and use up the material.”
“Anything for copy, hey?” the doctor chuckled.
“That’s about it. Well, my yarn runs about this way.” With the skill of an artist and the sympathy of a humanist—and the suppressed excitement of one who has something at stake—Peter drew his two principal characters, the conscientious, sensitive doctor possessed with the constant fear of that hypothetical case he might lose some day, and the smooth, scheming man a few years his senior who wanted to get his fellow-practitioner out of the way and marry the girl they both loved. Peter made the girl as adorable as a man in love might picture her.
“For a sixpence I’d wager you had fallen in love yourself.” Doctor Dempsy chuckled again. “I never before knew you to be so keen over feminine charms.”
“Just more copy,” and Peter went on with the tale. “Well, the young chap’s horror and fear kept growing with each new case, and the other chap kept sneering and suggesting that his nerves weren’t fit, and his hand wasn’t steady, and he worked too slowly. He kept it up until he got what he wanted; the young chap bungled his operation and lost his case.”
“Poor devil! I know just what kind of torment he lived through.” Doctor Dempsy raised himself on an elbow and shook his head at Peter. “A case like that may be fiction to you, but it’s fact to us in the profession. You have no idea how often a youngster’s nerves fail him.”
“Guess I’m getting the idea. But I need your help to finish the yarn. Of course the hospital couldn’t bounce him for losing one case. They would have to prove first that he wasn’t fit, wouldn’t they?”