Mary was a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips and finger-tips blue, but in her face no flush. In the effort to expel her breath she writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed up saliva dotted with grayish specks. Martin worried as he took out his clinical thermometer and gave it a professional-looking shake.
It was, he decided, laryngeal croup or diphtheria. Probably diphtheria. No time now for bacteriological examination, for cultures and leisurely precision. Silva the healer bulked in the room, crowding out Gottlieb the inhuman perfectionist. Martin leaned nervously over the child on the tousled bed, absent-mindedly trying her pulse again and again. He felt helpless without the equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and Angus Duer’s sure advice. He had a sudden respect for the lone country doctor.
He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous. He would use diphtheria antitoxin. But certainly he could not obtain it from Pete Yeska’s in Wheatsylvania.
Leopolis?
“Hustle up and get me Blassner, the druggist at Leopolis, on the ’phone,” he said to Novak, as calmly as he could contrive. He pictured Blassner driving through the night, respectfully bringing the antitoxin to The Doctor. While Novak bellowed into the farm-line telephone, in the dining-room, Martin waited—waited—staring at the child; Mrs. Novak waited for him to do miracles; the child’s tossing and hoarse gasping became horrible; and the glaring walls, the glaring lines of pale yellow woodwork, hypnotized him into sleepiness. It was too late for anything short of antitoxin or tracheotomy. Should he operate; cut into the wind-pipe that she might breathe? He stood and worried; he drowned in sleepiness and shook himself awake. He had to do something, with the mother kneeling there, gaping at him, beginning to look doubtful.
“Get some hot cloths—towels, napkins—and keep ’em around her neck. I wish to God he’d get that telephone call!” he fretted.
As Mrs. Novak, padding on thick slippered feet, brought in the hot cloths, Novak appeared with a blank “Nobody sleeping at the drug store, and Blassner’s house-line is out of order.”
“Then listen. I’m afraid this may be serious. I’ve got to have antitoxin. Going to drive t’ Leopolis and get it. You keep up these hot applications and— Wish we had an atomizer. And room ought to be moister. Got ’n alcohol stove? Keep some water boiling in here. No use of medicine. B’ right back.”
He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-seven minutes. Not once did he slow down for a cross-road. He defied the curves, the roots thrusting out into the road, though always one dark spot in his mind feared a blow-out and a swerve. The speed, the casting away of all caution, wrought in him a high exultation, and it was blessed to be in the cool air and alone, after the strain of Mrs. Novak’s watching. In his mind all the while was the page in Osler regarding diphtheria, the very picture of the words: “In severe cases the first dose should be from 8,000—” No. Oh, yes: “—from 10,000 to 15,000 units.”
He regained confidence. He thanked the god of science for antitoxin and for the gas motor. It was, he decided, a Race with Death.