“Say, who does he think I am, John D. Rockefeller?” Joe whispered to Tom.
“Don’t you worry,” Tom whispered back. “He’s a friend of old Doc Meyer’s, all right. He’ll fix it. You trot along.”
They had to wait in the doctor’s anteroom some time, as he had a patient in the office. Finally he came out and greeted Mr. Rogers warmly. He was not a native of Southmead, but had come there only two or three years ago from New York, to have his sanitorium in the country, and he had always been so busy that most of the townspeople scarcely knew him. Tom and Joe, while they had seen him, had never spoken with him before. He was a middle-aged Jew, with gold spectacles on his big nose, and large, kindly brown eyes, which grew very keen as he looked at the boys, and seemed to pierce right through them.
The scout master spoke to him a moment, in a low voice, and then he led all three into his office. It wasn’t like any doctor’s office the scouts had ever been in. It looked more like some sort of a mysterious laboratory, except for the flat-top office desk in the middle, and the strange chair, with wheels and joints, which could evidently be tipped at any angle, or made into a flat surface like an elevated sofa. There was a great X-ray machine, and many other strange devices, and rows of test tubes on a white enameled table, and sinks and sterilizers.
The doctor patted Joe on the head as if he’d been a little boy instead of a first class scout sixteen years old, going on seventeen, and large for his age. He sat Joe down in a chair and asked him a lot of questions first, making some notes on a card which he took out of a small filing cabinet that was like a library catalogue case. Then he told him to undress.
Joe stripped to the waist, and stood up while the doctor tapped his shoulders, his chest, his back, and then listened with his ear down both on his chest and back, and finally he took a stethoscope and went over every square inch of surface, front and back, covering his lungs, while he made the patient cough, say “Ah,” draw in a deep breath, and expel it slowly. Finally he took his temperature, and a sample of sputum.
Meanwhile Tom looked on with a rapidly increasing alarm. He knew a little something about tuberculosis, and realized it was for that he was examining his chum. He knew what a deadly disease it is, too, if it is not caught in time, and he began to feel sick in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to cry out to the doctor and demand that he tell him at once that old Joe did not have this terrible disease—that he was all right, that it was nothing but a cold. But, of course, he said not a word.
The doctor was putting Joe on the scales now, and weighing him.
“A hundred and fifteen,” he said. “How’s that? About your regular weight?”
“Guess there’s something wrong with your scales,” Joe answered, looking at the marker. “I ought to be a hundred and thirty. ’Course, I had more clothes on in the winter, last time I was weighed.”