As the elevator girl respectfully bore him to the top floor where his early rounds began, Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior, slouched with his tongue in the corner of his mouth. He was thinking:
"Could break her damn neck! Sex-repressed old maid."
Miss Patricia Withers had been night superintendent of nurses so many years that she had developed an hourly routine.
From two to four-thirty, after all of the clinics had checked-in their midnight patient rounds, she read mystery stories.
After thirteen false clues and flukes, she had just reached the place where the real murderer was to be revealed when her telephone bell intervened.
With an intensity, every motion of which was profane, she snatched up the receiver:
Miss Withers checked her: "Yes. What do you want?"
"This is Medicine Clinic, Ward B, Miss Evelina Kerr, Student Nurse, speaking. The telephone of the night supervisor Medicine Clinic does not answer, so I am reporting to your office the death of Alice Tuck, patient in Bed 11."
"What?" Miss Withers' breath pushed each letter through the receiver.
"Reporting the death...." the student nurse's voice began to quaver it out again.
"I heard you before, child! Are you sure? No pulse? No respiration? Draw the curtains and leave everything exactly ... exactly, you understand until your superiors come...."
There seemed to be no response and Miss Withers feared the nurse had fainted.
"Can you hear me?" the authority in her voice would have revived the dead woman, if she had been nearer.
The night operator of the hospital was interrupted in her regular reverie as to whether she could get into the movies, by Miss Withers:
"Get Dr. Mattus. Get the morgue. Get Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior. Get Dr. Sarah James ... and get Miss Kerr."
The telephone girl decided that was enough for the present and rang off.
"Hell-let-loose," she muttered and began ringing Mattus' 'phone.
Miss Withers sat drumming her desk. Again. That's the third one! Superstitions! Like three on a match!
Dr. Sidney Mattus turned over in his white iron bed in his "Germicidal Cell," and reached for the ringing telephone.
He spat the word with sleepy vehemence born of unconscious fatigue. The contact between his ear and the receiver took several motions.