ial, masked, rubber-gloved, and slippered,
and splashed with the same ominous stains that were on the table and upon
the floor, Saxham's heavy-shouldered figure was as ominous and sinister as
ever played a part in mediaeval torture-chamber, or figured in a
nightmare-tale of Poe's device. You can see the other surgeons, bibbed and
sleeved, the Irishman, small and dark and wiry, sousing a lethal array of
sharp and gleaming implements in a glass bath of carbolic; Taggart,
standing at a glass table, rubber-wheeled and movable, like everything
else for use, and laden with rolls of lint and bandaging, and blue-glass
bottles of peroxide of hydrogen and mercurial perchloride, daintily
returning reels of silk-worm-gut and bobbins of silver wire to their
velvet-lined case.

"You're no' fatigued? You would no' like a steemulant?"

Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been staring with dull
intensity of desire at the brandy-decanter, forgotten by the matron, whose
usual charge it was. And the sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart
followed the glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal.

"Fatigued? I hardly think so!"

He laughed, and the others joined in the laugh, remembering the lengthy
line of patients operated on in a single mid-week morning at St.
Stephen's. And yet his steady hand shook a little, and a curious soft,
subtle dulness of sensation was stealing over him. He had gone to bed
sober, had risen after three hours of blessed, unexpected, helpful sleep,
to battle with his desperate craving until morning. When the old woman
left in charge of the housekeeping arrangements had come to his door with
hot water and his usual breakfast--a mug of strong coffee with milk and a
roll--he had gulped down the reviving, steadying draught thirstily, and
swallowed a mouthful or two of the bread; and when he was shaved and
tubbed and clothed in the shabby white drill suit, had gone down to the
dispensary and mixed himself a dose of chloric ether and strychnine,
strong enough to brace his jarred nerves for the coming ordeal.

Not that Saxham habitually drugged: that craving was not yet known to him.
But the habitual intemperance had exacted even from his iron constitution
its forfeit of shakiness in the morning, and the rare sobriety left the
man suffering and unstrung.

Looking about him as the dose began its work of stringing the lax nerves
and stimulating the action of the heart, he saw that many of the drawers