The man was dead, but the jangle lasted a laughing minute or more, the while he lay there; then he was removed to the morgue and the loser compelled to “come across” or “fork over.”
One of the internes who occasionally went out “on the wagon,” as the ambulance was called, told me that once, having picked up a badly injured man who had been knocked down by a car, this same ambulance on racing with this man to the hospital had knocked down another and all but killed him.
“And what did you do about him?” I asked.
“Stopped the boat and chucked him into it, of course.”
“On top of the other one?”
“Side by side, sure. It was a little close, though.”
“Well, did he die?”
“Yep. But the other one was all right. We couldn’t help it, though. It was a life or death case for the first one.”
“A fine deal for the merry bystander,” was all I could say.
The very worst of all in connection with this great hospital, and I do not care to dwell on it at too great length since it has all been exposed before and the records are available, was this: about the hospital, in the capacity of orderlies, doormen, gatemen, errand boys, gardeners, and what not, were a number of down-and-out ex-patients or pensioners of politicians so old and feeble and generally decrepit mentally and physically as to be fit for little more than the scrap-heap. Their main desire, in so far as I could see, was to sit in the sun or safely within the warmth of a room and do nothing at all. If you asked them a question their first impulse and greatest delight was to say “Don’t know” or refer you to some one else. They were accused by the half dozen reporters who daily foregathered here to be of the lowest, so low indeed that they could be persuaded to do anything for a little money. And in pursuance of this theory there was one day propounded by a little red-headed Irish police reporter who used to hang about there that he would bet anybody five dollars that for the sum of fifteen dollars he could hire old Gansmuder, who was one of the shabbiest and vilest-looking of the hospital orderlies, to kill a man. According to him, and he had his information from one of the policemen stationed in the hospital, Gansmuder was an ex-convict who had done ten years’ time for a similar crime. Now old and penniless, he was here finishing up a shameful existence, the pensioner of some politician to whom he had rendered a service perhaps.