“Good-morning,” and he glanced round him like a man in a hurry; “first case. Well, how’s the leg?”
A scraggy, undersized individual with a narrow, swarthy face was pulling up a trousers leg with two dirty, drug-stained hands. He was a worker in a chemical factory, and his ugly, harsh, and suspicious features seemed to have taken the low moral stamp of the place.
“No worse, doct’r.”
“No worse! Well, have you been resting?”
“Half an’ half.”
“I suppose so. You may as well come here and grumble for months unless you do what we tell you. It is quite useless continuing like this.”
He bent down and began to unwind the dirty bandage from the man’s leg. The chemical worker expanded the broad nostrils of his carnivorous nose, sniffed, and cocked a battered bowler onto the back of his head. Manners were not mended in Dr. Tugler’s surgery.
“God’s truth, doct’r, easy with it—”
Murchison had stripped a sodden pad of lint and plaster from the ulcer on the man’s leg.
“Nonsense; that didn’t hurt you.”