Page:Arthur B Reeve - The Dream Doctor.djvu/240

 which I could almost picture to myself lying there through the silent hours of the night before, with its life blood slowly oozing away, unconscious, powerless to save itself. There were spurts of arterial blood on the floor and on the nearby laboratory furniture, and beside the workbench another smaller and isolated pool of blood.

On a table in a corner by the window stood a microscope which Cushing evidently used, and near it a box of fresh sterilised slides. Kennedy, who had been casting his eye carefully about taking in the whole laboratory, seemed delighted to find the slides. He opened the box and gingerly took out some of the little oblong pieces of glass, on each of which he dropped a couple of minute drops of blood from the arterial spurts and the venous pools on the floor.

Near the workbench were circular marks, much as if some jars had been set down there. We were watching him, almost in awe at the matter of fact manner in which he was proceeding in what to us was nothing but a hopeless enigma, when I saw him stoop and pick up a few little broken pieces of glass. There seemed to be blood spots on the glass, as on other things, but particularly interesting to him.

A moment later I saw that he was holding in his hand what were apparently the remains of a little broken vial which he had fitted together from the pieces. Evidently it had been used and dropped in haste.

"A vial for a local anesthetic," he remarked. "This is the sort of thing that might be injected into an arm or leg and deaden the pain of a cut, but that is all.