tight over her face before I turn on more light." His voice was surly.
"I won't touch her again if she has smallpox!" Teresa's strident voice shook.
"Yes, you will, or I'll brain you." He took a step toward her. The woman muttered, but obeyed, though her hands shook as she fumbled with the bandage. Crossing herself, she said with shaking voice:
"All safe," and stepped back again to the wall. The light was turned on, and Carlson bent down to look more closely at his mysterious patient.
A deep, feverish flush was over the arms, neck and the strip of forehead above the bandage. But Carlson's trained fingers could not feel even a suggestion of the "shotty" feeling which goes with the first rash of smallpox.
"What do you make of it, Doc?" asked the man impatiently.
"Highly suspicious, but I cannot tell certainly until I have finished my examination. Madam. may I listen to your lungs and heart with my stethoscope?"
"Yes," she faintly murmured. Carlson looked around at the man.
"I am not in the habit of examining women in the presence of strange men," he said sharply. The man mumbled a curse and turned his back. Carlson then looked at the masked woman.
"Turn down the bedclothes and open her nightgown!"
"Do it yourself! I won't touch her again!"
Carlson took his stethoscope from his pocket and bared the patient's chest. The nightgown was coarse and cheap, but the form within it was rounded and beautiful. The sleeves of the garment had apparently been roughly hacked off with scissors. Carlson's examination of lungs and heart found absolutely nothing to account for the very high fever. Then he thought of appendicitis or peritonitis.
"Now, please let me examine the abdomen for a moment."
She lay still while he delicately arranged the clothing. The light from the chandelier showed obliquely, so that the lower part of the abdomen was in the shadow cast by the rolled-down bedclothes. Carlson felt and carefully sounded, but she gave no sign of pain or involuntary resistance.
As his sensitive fingers passed over the place under which the appendix is located, he felt something that broke the smoothness of the perfect skin. It was a surgical scar. That fact alone should almost certainly rule oat a present attack of appendicitis!
"So you have had appendicitis?"
"Yes."
"It must have been a bad case—to judge from the size of the scar." She did not answer, and he drew the covering a little lower and brought the scar out of the shadow into fall view. Then he started, and, involuntarily, a gasp escaped him. The large surgical scar was in the form of a perfect reversed letter S.
IV
So much had happened to Carlson that night that his mental receiving instrument was somewhat dulled, and did not immediately register the momentous significance of what his eyes now saw. That curious scar—that reversed S—symbol of the great Senn. Great God! Now he remembered. The only case on record in which that Senn S-incision had been made for appendicitis was the case of Ina Holden.
He heard the masked man muttering in angry impatience, and then his brain began to work again. The Holden child. Edwards had spoken of her as "little Ina."
