Diagnosis: Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne by Edward Hoch

Author:Edward Hoch [Hoch, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780739418963
Publisher: Crippen & Landru
Published: 2016-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

THE PROBLEM OF CELL 16

“Sure,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne began, filling the glasses, “there was a time when Northmont made the front pages of papers all across the country. Another small—ah—libation? And some of the stories even mentioned my name. They called me a young New England doctor and that’s what I was, back in the late spring o’ 1926 when The Eel came to our town. . ..”

It was a warm day for May (Dr. Sam remembered), and I’d gone out to Jeff Whitehead’s farm to treat a gunshot wound. That in itself was unusual because we didn’t get many gunshot wounds in Northmont ’cept durin’ huntin’ season. Jeff and Mrs. Whitehead had 40 acres of good farmland that he worked with their two teen-age sons. I’d never treated the family for anythin’ more serious than the flu, though I’d visited the farm the previous summer to see some giant mushrooms that had sprouted in a back pasture. I wasn’t an expert on the subject—mycology, I think it’s called—but I was able to confirm they were safe to eat.

This day Matt, the older son, met me at the farmhouse. He was the one who’d telephoned me, and he called out, “This way, Dr. Sam. He’s bleedin’ bad!”

“Who is?”

“Eustace Carey. He’s been shot in the left thigh.” Carey owned one of Northmont’s two general stores and he was somethin’ of a troublemaker. Still, that didn’t explain what he was doin’ bleedin’ from a gunshot wound in Jeff Whitehead’s pasture. “How’d it happen?”

“Don’t know, Dr. Sam.”

I left my yellow Runabout parked by the house and walked back through the fields carryin’ my medical bag. We came over a slight rise and there they were—Jeff Whitehead and a man from town named Henkle, both standin’ over Eustace Carey. They’d tried to fashion a maskeshifit tourniquet around his upper thigh, but it hadn’t done much good. I could see at a glance that the wound itself wasn’t too serious, though he’d lost a good deal o’ blood and that was always dangerous.

“I think I’m dyin’, Doc,” he said to me.

“Nonsense, Eustace!” I started cuttin’ away the trouser leg. “How in hell did this happen?”

“I was walkin’ with that gun an’ I tripped over a root.”

The gun, a long-barreled Colt revolver, lay on the grass nearby. “This is hardly the huntin’ season,” I commented, going to work on the wound.

“We were shootin’ at woodchucks,” Jeff Whitehead volunteered. I turned to look at his son Matt and at Rudy Henkle. “All four of you? Where’s your wife an’ younger boy, Jeff?”

“In town, doin’the shoppin’.”

“You know I gotta report gunshot wounds to the sheriff.”

“Sure,” the wounded man said. “Report it.”

On the way back to town fate played one of its crazy tricks.

When I finished patchin’ him up the best I could, I suggested we ride into my office where I could try to probe for the bullet. “We may have to put you in the hospital over in Felix for a few days, but you’ll pull through all right.

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