“Keep still, keep still. You’ll wake the old man. I can’t let you in.”
“Was that him, slumped down in the chair? Must be tired to sleep in that position. Say, old chap, you were my best man, and now I want you again.”
“Want me to draw up papers for a divorce?” said Mr. Middleton, gloomily. How was he going to get rid of this inopportune fellow?
“Shut up,” said Chauncy Stackelberg. “It’s a boy, and I want you to come up to the christening next Sunday and be godfather. You don’t know how happy I am. Say, come on down and get a drink.”
Ten minutes before, Mr. Middleton had been convinced that drink was a very great curse, but he accepted this invitation with alacrity, naming a saloon two blocks away as the one he considered best in that vicinity. He surmised that the happy father would hardly offer to come back with him from such a distance, and the surmise was correct. As he reascended to the office, with him in the elevator were two gentlemen, one of whom he recognized as Dr. Angus McAllyn, a celebrated surgeon who had two or three times come to the office to see Mr. Brockelsby and the other as Dr. Lucius Darst, a young eye and ear specialist who within the space of but a few days had established his office in the building. To neither of these gentlemen, however, was Mr. Middleton known.
“I want you to get off on this floor with me,” said Dr. McAllyn to his medical confrere. “I may want your assistance a bit. You see,” he went on, as they got out of the elevator and started down the corridor with Mr. Middleton just behind, “we had a banquet last night of the Society of Andrew Jackson’s Wars, and my friend Brockelsby got too much aboard. He was turned over to me to take to his home, but just as we were leaving, I received an urgent call. So the best I could do was to drive by here and start him toward his office and go on. He could navigate after a fashion and doubtless spent the night all right in his office, and I would take no farther trouble with him but for the fact that he has an important case to-day. So I want to fix him up, and as I haven’t much time, you can be of service to me.”
“Ah, ha,” said Mr. Middleton to himself, “I’ll just lie low until they have given up trying to get in and have gone.”
But they did not go away. To his consternation, they opened the door and walked in, for though he had put the key in the lock when he had closed the door behind him to parley with Chauncy Stackelberg, he had walked away without turning it! They would find Mr. Brockelsby! Great though Dr. McAllyn was, he would hardly be likely to recognize a condition of suspended animation. Unless Mr. Middleton confessed, there was danger that the famous forensic orator would be buried alive. And if he confessed, what would the consequences be to himself? The fact that in whatever event he would lose his place and be a marked and disgraced man, was the very least thing to consider. He was threatened with far more serious dangers than that. First, there would be the vengeance the law would take upon him for meddling with and tampering with medical matters. But even if he had been a physician, would the medical faculty look otherwise than with horror upon this rash and wanton experimenting with the strange and unholy practices of India? Even a medical man would be arrested for malpractice and for depriving a fellow being of the use of his faculties. The penitentiary stared him in the face.
He could not endure not to know what was taking place within. He must have knowledge of everything in order to know what moves to make and when to make them. He let himself through the outer door of Mr. Brockman’s private office, and by taking a position by the door communicating between this office and the main office, he could hear everything in safety.
“Shall I send for an undertaker?” asked Dr. Darst.