he trained-nurse-apparelled young woman seated Dag Daughtry in
the enamelled surgeon's chair and leaned him back under direction, and
while Doctor Emory dipped his finger-tips into the strongest antiseptic
his office possessed, behind Doctor Emory's eyes, in the midst of his
brain, burned the image of a desired Irish terrier who did turns in
sailor-town cabarets, was rough-coated, and answered to the full name of
Killeny Boy.

"You've got rheumatism in more places than your little finger," he
assured Daughtry. "There's a touch right here, I'll wager, on your
forehead. One moment, please. Move if I hurt you, Otherwise sit still,
because I don't intend to hurt you. I merely want to see if my diagnosis
is correct.--There, that's it. Move when you feel anything. Rheumatism
has strange freaks.--Watch this, Miss Judson, and I'll wager this form of
rheumatism is new to you. See. He does not resent. He thinks I have
not begun yet . . . "

And as he talked, steadily, interestingly, he was doing what Dag Daughtry
never dreamed he was doing, and what made Kwaque, looking on, almost
dream he was seeing because of the unrealness and impossibleness of it.
For, with a large needle, Doctor Emory was probing the dark spot in the
midst of the vertical lion-lines. Nor did he merely probe the area.
Thrusting into it from one side, under the skin and parallel to it, he
buried the length of the needle from sight through the insensate
infiltration. This Kwaque beheld with bulging eyes; for his master
betrayed no sign that the thing was being done.

"Why don't you begin?" Dag Daughtry questioned impatiently. "Besides, my
rheumatism don't count. It's the nigger-boy's swelling."

"You need a course of treatment," Doctor Emory assured him. "Rheumatism
is a tough proposition. It should never be let grow chronic. I'll fix
up a course of treatment for you. Now, if you'll get out of the chair,
we'll look at your black servant."

But first, before Kwaque was leaned back, Doctor Emory threw over the
chair a sheet that smelled of having been roasted almost to the scorching
point. As he was about to examine Kwaque, he looked with a slight start
of recollection at his watch. When he saw the time he startled more, and
turned a reproachful face upon his assistant.

"Miss Judson," he said, coldly emphatic, "you have failed me. Here it
is, twenty before twelve, and you knew I was to confer with Doctor Hadley
over that case at eleven-