The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck Read Free Page A

fear, and asked, “What are you thinking? What do you mean?”
    “Nothing much. I’d just like to think that some of my friends are liars. Would it help any if I punched them on the snoot?”
    She looked almost relieved, and then defiant. “Oh, that! Just ’cause I’m a farm kid, I suppose. All you read about—wicked cities, nice upright country folks. Oh yeah? If they knew what went on back of the barn on every farm I ever saw.”
    She was talking shrilly, and hysterically.
    “Don’t worry, Dave. They didn’t have anything to teach me here. Maybe I’m too—good-natured. What if I am? You can be a lot worse things than good-natured. People can act like you’d think they were—Dave! Do you—do you believe in—devils? On earth, I mean, getting inside of people—like in the Bible. Oh, never mind, I guess I am going crazy.”
    Impressed, I took a flyer. “I can’t think of anybody who’s got a fiend inside him, around here—of course excepting old Wyck.”
    She stopped short, staring with startled eyes.
    “Then you know— What are you talking about?”
    “Things you couldn’t possibly know about. Got anything to add to the horrible record?”
    “She said, “No!” as if in great relief.
    “Well, that reminds me. Biddy Connell claims you told her that the amputation wasn’t necessary. Maybe it wasn’t. But no good can possibly come of saying a thing like that.”
    “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she cut in.
    “Oh, yes I do. I’m not thinking about Wyck. The hell with him. I’m thinking of the Connells. It’s bad enough to be crippled. But it’s harder to bear if somebody gives you the idea that it wasn’t necessary. Don’t you understand that?”
    “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeated stubbornly. “Oh, but I’ve got to tell somebody—something—anything— Even if it’s just what happened last night.”
    “What was that, Muriel?”
    “No, never mind.”
    “Suit yourself,” I said with a shrug.
    “All right, then, I will!” she cried. “Other people saw that. They can at least make him stop practicing, even if that’s all they do. And there was somebody else saw that much, anyway, about half past one this morning.”
    “Saw what?” I inquired, mystified.
    “Saw the way he treated two poor old people at the hospital.”
    I remembered Marjorie Wyck’s call to say that her father was wanted at the hospital, after he had stopped in to see Mike.
    Finally she got out her incoherent story, in bursts of passionate bitterness. It seemed to me not to be worth all the fuss she was making about it, but I realized that her emotion was being caused by something worse which she dared not speak of. Here is the outline of the incident:
    Peter Tompkins, aged fourteen years, had shot himself through the lung while hunting. Mike had told me “the histhory of the case” a month ago, it having been his blood that saved the boy’s life. Peter had progressed fairly well for three weeks or so. Then a lung abscess had developed, and Gideon Wyck had told the poverty-stricken parents that nothing could save their son. At their insistence, however, an oxygen tent had been rigged. At one o’clock the morning on which my story opens—April 3rd—after the costly cylinders of gas had been hissing for four days and five hours, Nurse Finch failed to distinguish a pulse, and put a call in for Dr. Wyck. “There they sat, near dead themselves,” she said, “when in comes Dr. Wyck. Four days they’d been watching, with hardly a break, he in his overalls and a patched old army coat. She had on something you couldn’t tell what it was, it was so old.
    “ ‘Phew,’ says Dr. Wyck, coming in, ‘what makes this place stink so?’ I nodded toward them, a little bit. ‘Phew,’ he says again, ‘Why don’t you send ’em out for a bath?’ A nice thing, with their son dying in the room. I whispered there might not be any use in their coming back.
    “ ‘Hey?’