“Good-night, doctor.”
Dr. Tugler faced round with his hands stuffed into his trousers pockets.
“Hallo, Smith, find the knife sharp, eh?”
The man grinned, and glanced at his bandaged hand.
“There was a tidy lot of muck in it,” he said.
“Good thing we’ve saved the finger. Paid your bob, eh? Right. Keep off the booze, and go straight home to the missus.”
Tugler turned down the gas-jets, and entered the surgery. A big man in a white cotton coat was bending over the sink and washing a porcelain tray under the hot-water tap. Blood-stained swabs of wool lay in an old paper basket under the sink. A couple of scalpels, a pair of dressing forceps and scissors, a roll of lint, dental forceps still clutching a decayed tooth, an excised cyst floating in a bowl of blood-stained water, such were the details that completed the picture of a general surgeon at work.
Dr. Tugler cast a quick and observant glance round the room, turned down the gas a little, and counted the bandages in a card-board box on the dresser.
“Feel fagged, Murchison, eh?”
The big man turned, his lined and powerful face wearing a look of patient self-restraint.