Publisher's Synopsis
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and twotraveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone. His offices were in the DukeBlock, over the drug store. Larry, the doctor's man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-roomand the double student's lamp on the desk in the study. The isinglass sides of the hard-coal burnerwere aglow, and the air in the study was so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door intohis little operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting room was carpeted and stifflyfurnished, something like a country parlor. The study had worn, unpainted floors, but there was alook of winter comfort about it. The doctor's flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers werein orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the ceiling. It was filled with medical books of every thickness and color.On the top shelf stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark mottled boardcovers, with imitation leather backs.As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially old, so the doctor in small Colorado townstwenty-five years ago was generally young. Dr. Archie was barely thirty. He was tall, with massiveshoulders which he held stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a distinguished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.There was something individual in the way in which his reddish-brown hair, parted cleanly at theside, bushed over his high forehead. His nose was straight and thick, and his eyes were intelligent.He wore a curly, reddish mustache and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look a little like thepictures of Napoleon III. His hands were large and well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backswere shaded with crinkly reddish hair. He wore a blue suit of woolly, wide-waled serge; the travelingmen had known at a glance that it was made by a Denver tailor. The doctor was always well dressed.Dr. Archie turned up the student's lamp and sat down in the swivel chair before his desk. He satuneasily, beating a tattoo on his knees with his fingers, and looked about him as if he were bored.He glanced at his watch, then absently took from his pocket a bunch of small keys, selected one andlooked at it. A contemptuous smile, barely perceptible, played on his lips, but his eyes remainedmeditative. Behind the door that led into the hall, under his buffalo-skin driving-coat, was a lockedcupboard. This the doctor opened mechanically, kicking aside a pile of muddy overshoes. Inside, onthe shelves, were whiskey glasses and decanters, lemons, sugar, and bitters. Hearing a step in theempty, echoing hall without, the doctor closed the cupboard again, snapping the Yale lock. The doorof the waiting-room opened, a man entered and came on into the consulting-room."Good-evening, Mr. Kronborg," said the doctor carelessly. "Sit down."His visitor was a tall, loosely built man, with a thin brown beard, streaked with gray. He wore afrock coat, a broad-brimmed black hat, a white lawn necktie, and steel rimmed spectacles. Altogetherthere was a pretentious and important air about him, as he lifted the skirts of his coat and sat down."Good-evening, doctor. Can you step around to the house with me? I think Mrs. Kronborg willneed you this evening." This was said with profound gravity and, curiously enough, with a slightembarrassmen