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Account of Courtney Stone, M.D., Surg. D., F.A.C.S.: Chief Surgeon Albany Post-Graduate Hospital, etc., etc.:

At about eleven p.m. on August 15, 1934, I was in my study, too tired to retire. I had that afternoon performed nine operations at the hospital; including the excision of a cerebral carcinoma of which I was a little proud; and had attended a joint consultation by the medical and surgical staffs that had gone on and on, endlessly.

Two days before, a patient in coma had been brought in from the Helderberg region. The routine tests had revealed no pathologic malfunction, no trauma sufficient to explain his condition; nor did his symptoms correspond to any known disease. In a manner of speaking there were no symptoms except the stupor and, so gradual that it was almost imperceptible, a fading away of vitality that unless checked must inevitably result fatally.

Although surgical intervention was by no means indicated I had been intrigued by the puzzle this case presented and was pondering it when my meditations were interrupted by the furious tingling of my doorbell. I waited an instant for Mrs. Small, my housekeeper, to answer it, recalled that I had given her the night off and shoved myself unwillingly out of my chair.

A nervous, hysterical quality in the bell’s pealing told me that the late caller was in search of my professional services. My practice has long ago reached the point where night calls are merely a matter for resentment, and I was prepared to send the fellow to young Adams, down the road, with a flea in his ear.

I changed my mind however when, opening the door with one hand as I clicked on the hall light with the other, I looked straight into, Hugh Lambert’s face, pallid and dirt-streaked. He was palpably in a state of collapse and would have fallen if he had not been supported on one side by Edith Horne, the nurse I had recommended for his camp, and on the other by a second girl whom I perceived only vaguely.

It was she who had been ringing. “We’ve had an awful accident,” she blurted. “Hugh’s terribly hurt.”

“Slashed artery, Doctor Stone,” Edith interposed, “in the left leg. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Get him into surgery and I’ll get right to work. I’m glad you brought him to me instead of the hospital.” That was quite true. Anthony Wagner, Wanooka’s millionaire owner, is also a financial mainstay of the hospital and so the medical supervision of the camp has devolved upon me. I visit it frequently. Despite the disparity of our ages I have grown extremely fond of Hugh and I should not have wanted some half-baked intern messing around with him. “Here, let me help you.”

“I can ... hop ... along,” Hugh muttered between set teeth. “Help other—”

“That’s all right,” a nasal twang came from the porch. “I carried him this far an’ I can manage to get him the rest of the way.” As the others shuffled past me, a gangling gaunt-visaged man in overalls shoved in through the door, his arms cradling a dark form whose limbs dangled flaccidly. I realized that I had another patient.

“Come on in. You know the way.”

I had recognized Jethro Parker, a farmer who the winter before had once or twice accompanied a friend here. He grunted acquiescence and I turned to go through the entrance hall to the rear of the house.

“Get Hugh on the examining table, Edith,” I called. The nurse elbowed a tumbler switch beside the surgery door and the white blaze of the white-tiled room silhouetted the slowly moving trio. Hugh’s legs caved in. I saw that at the last minute he’d lost consciousness and I sprang to aid the girls.

Parker choked out an exclamation behind me, but I paid no attention other than to throw over my shoulder a direction for him to lay his charge on a leather-covered couch nearby. Lambert’s left trouser leg was a gory sponge. The cloth was slashed and the flesh beneath it deeply gashed, so that the anterior tibial artery was laid open for two inches as neatly as though it had been done with a scalpel.

The lacerated vessel should have been literally fountaining blood, but there was only a slight seepage. I looked for the explanation, disentangled from the sopping jumble of cloth above it a tight bandage of once white fabric, that had been knotted over the gastrocnemius to make a crude tourniquet, so expertly applied I knew it was Edith’s work.

“Will he be all right, doctor?” the other girl asked, behind me. “Will he live?”

“Of course,” I answered with the gruff curtness I have found to be more reassuring to jittery relatives and friends than a gentler manner. “You can’t kill a bull like this with a scratch.” But I wasn’t as confident as I made myself sound. His exsanguinated pallor told me that Hugh had spilled a devil of a lot of blood. “Just go out in the waiting room, please, and make yourself comfortable while we take care of him.” I felt Hugh’s pulse. It was damned feeble and twice too rapid.

“Mr. Parker,” I continued, “you’ve been here before. Please show the lady.” Sotto voce to Edith I murmured, “First thing is to sterilize and suture that artery. Prepare what I’ll need while I take a look at the other one. You know where everything is, don’t you?”

“Yes, doctor,” she answered crisply, though she was whiter around the gills than a nurse of her experience should be even with her patient as bad a mess as Lambert. “I haven’t forgotten.”

She moved away and I straightened to examine the other case. Parker was between us. He had slumped into a chair, his head buried in his knotted hands. “Now, now, man,” I rebuked him. “You ought to be able to stand the sight of a little blood.”

He looked at me, his weather-beaten face greenish under its stubble. “It ain’t that.” His pupils were dilated, his tone a half-whisper of almost religious awe. “It’s not the blood.” He swallowed with perceptible effort. “It— Doc! do you— Could a man come to life after being drowned six months? Changed, maybe?”

“Nonsense,” I snorted. “What on earth gave you such an idea as that?”

His head turned, slowly, reluctantly, to the figure on the couch. “When I came into the light I saw his face and—” A sigh as if of relief, cut his sentence short. “No,” he resumed. “I guess I was wrong. He’s just a tramp. I guess I was just kind of kerflumoxed with all the excitement.”

“I guess you were,” I said dryly. “Look. The third bottle on the bottom shelf over there is whisky. Pour yourself a jolt. That’s the best medicine for what ails you.” I had no time for the vagaries of superstitious rustics.

“May I have some too?” a clear bell-like voice asked wistfully. “I rather imagine I could use it.”

“Of course.” I really saw the other girl then for the first time. Disheveled and disarrayed as she was, she was something worth seeing.

She was tall, but she carried that tallness with a singularly graceful poise, and there was singing rhythm to every line of her body. Ordinarily the harsh glare of my floodlight is cruel to feminine charm, but it merely emphasized the pearly sheen of her skin, the delicate modeling of her features. I found myself pensively wishing that I was not short and rotund, that there were no gray hairs in my Vandyke.

“You were in that accident, too. Are you hurt?”

“Just shaken up a little.” She smiled briefly. “And bruised. Nothing to take you away from poor Hugh.”

“Don’t be too sure, Ann Doring.” I knew her at once. “I’ll look you over later. Meantime, if you’d like to clean up you’ll find everything you need at the head of the stairs.”

“Thank you. I’ll take advantage of your kindness. But first, my drink.”

“It’s all poured out, miss,” Parker said from across the room. “I’ve had mine an’ I’ll be runnin’ along. Marthy will be worrying about what become of me.”

Miss Doring downed her drink and followed him out of the room. I turned to look at the tramp.

“I’ve cut his shirt and coat away,” Edith Horne said as I came around. “So you won’t have to bother with that.” Competent as all get-out, that young lady. I don’t know a better nurse. I had hated to send her up to the lake, but she’d earned a vacation through a busy winter, and besides she was just right for the job. Strictly business and no feminine nonsense. “His clothes are so old they’re moldy and rotted.”

“Third and fourth ventral ribs caved in,” I diagnosed aloud as I stepped toward the couch. “Look like they’re driven into the lungs.” But they couldn’t be— I frowned. The fellow would be dead or writhing in agony if they were. He wouldn’t be watching me with a curious detachment out of eyes as expressionless and blackly glinting as camera lenses.

His torso was of that distinctive gray-whiteness one associates with long defunct corpses, and entirely aside from the costal depression on which I based my superficial diagnosis there was something grotesque about it. The word is rather melodramatic, but it fits the gross, lumpy malformation of that body.

Perhaps I may more clearly convey his appearance by saying he looked as if some child had thumbed out of putty an inept, three-dimensional caricature of a human form.

His flesh was clammy under my probing hands, and peculiarly soggy, evoking from the mists of the long years a recollection of student days and my first formaldehyde-pickled cadaver. I had been right! The bones beneath were free-floating, torn from their anchorage. The man’s stoicism was remarkable. He should have shrieked under the pressure I applied, but he did not make a sound. I glanced at his face, wondering if he had fainted.

I knew that face. Or rather, I knew the one it had been ineptly molded to resemble.

The card file in my mind presented the appropriate memo:

NAME: Elijah Fenton. DIAGNOSIS: Fibrous tumor, right side of neck. TREATMENT: Excision of growth. RESULT: Successful. POST-OPERATIVE CARE: Weekly dressings, discontinued because patient drowned, 12/11/33.

I laughed shortly. Was I as credulous as Jethro Parker, letting a chance resemblance suggest impossible things? This could not be Fenton. Fenton had been drowned last winter in the tragedy at which all Albany shuddered.

A feathery chill brushed my spine. There, from clavicle to point of the right mandible, was the healed scar of the incision my own scalpel had made!