Dr. Worth felt that if he didn’t apply the brakes he would become positively lightheaded. “Oh, yes, yes, indeed, Officer. He called up to warn me that my patient was going to be murdered and suggested that I run downstairs and stop it. Murder? Fiddlesticks—it’s beginning to graduate into a catastrophe.”
“What has happened here?”
Lieutenant Valcour, very pale, still very weak, and with an improvised bandage around his head, had come unobserved into the room.
“You can see,” Dr. Worth said with almost insulting distinctness, “for yourself.”
Dr. Worth then went on to expand. He related in detail his version of the battle—he insisted that it was a battle—which had just taken place.
Entirely apart from the natural discomfiture of his head, Lieutenant Valcour was feeling desperately glum. Under no light, no matter how favourable, could his handling of the case be considered a success. He had to his credit one slap on the face, a good crack on the head from a lead slug, and now it seemed that the very man whom they had been ordered to guard had been shot and killed by his own men. That, at least, was the impression the angry bee talking to him was obviously trying to give. Oh, it would be a cause célèbre all right, but he shuddered to think of just what it would be celebrated for.
“This,” he said, “is nonsense.”
Dr. Worth was by now thoroughly acid.
“I am glad that you are able to find in the miserable situation some element of humour, Lieutenant.”
“Humour? Not humour, Doctor. I am just trying to say that the probability of Endicott’s having been shot by one of my men is