at me quickly and then turned his attention again to the body.
Like a flash there had come to me the vision of the woman with
the bronze hair and the tragic face, whom I had surprised in the
vestibule between the cars, somewhere in the small hours of the
morning. I had acted on my first impulse--the masculine one of
shielding a woman.

The doctor had unfastened the coat of the striped pajamas and
exposed the dead man's chest. On the left side was a small
punctured wound of insignificant size.

"Very neatly done," the doctor said with appreciation. "Couldn't
have done it better myself. Right through the intercostal space:
no time even to grunt."

"Isn't the heart around there somewhere?" I asked. The medical
man turned toward me and smiled austerely.

"That's where it belongs, just under that puncture, when it isn't
gadding around in a man's throat or his boots."

I had a new respect for the doctor, for any one indeed who could
crack even a feeble joke under such circumstances, or who could
run an impersonal finger over that wound and those stains. Odd
how a healthy, normal man holds the medical profession in half
contemptuous regard until he gets sick, or an emergency like this
arises, and then turns meekly to the man who knows the ins and outs
of his mortal tenement, takes his pills or his patronage, ties to
him like a rudderless ship in a gale.