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still argued over the validity of what he actually called the “germ theory.”
    In his student days, when he was younger and more arrogant, Tyler might have felt contempt for an old has-been like Stoneman; but experience had taught him the valuable lesson that he didn’t know half as much as he thought he did, and that tolerance was probably a higher virtue than knowledge anyway. Patient after patient in his new practice had a story to tell about “the old doc’s” utterly selfless dedication. Doc Stoneman never refused a call, day or night, for anybody except drunks with headaches. Doc Stoneman sat for hours with the dying, the suffering, the bereaved. Sure, Doc Stoneman was a drunk, but as soon as he got to your house you started to feel better, just because you knew he cared. He lived in two rooms over the hardware store now, drinking and coughing, claiming he was writing his memoirs. For a man who had spent the last forty years taking care of people, he got depressingly few visitors. He was lonely. Tyler was “the young doc,” admired and esteemed and courted; but sometimes on long winter nights, he got lonely, too.
    But it was getting late; in all likelihood Stoneman wouldn’t pay him a call this evening. With luck, no one would pound on the door with an emergency. Tyler had casebook work to catch up on, but his brain felt cottony tonight and it would be hard to concentrate—another lingering effect of the yellow fever. God, he was sick of being sick. The only good thing about it was that it made him more sympathetic to his patients, because before his illness he’d always taken his physical strength and mental acuity for granted. He took nothing for granted now, and like a careful surveyor he monitored every inch of progress he made on the long, excruciatingly slow road to recovery.
    He put his empty cup in the sink with his dinner dishes; sometimes he washed up after himself, but tonight he felt like leaving things for his housekeeper. He would read the paper, he decided, and turn in early. He had his finger on the kitchen light switch when a knock came at the back porch door. His porch light had burned out; he squinted through the black glass, but all he could discern was the tall, dark, bundled-up form of a man. He hoped it was Stoneman, not Crystal Blubaugh’s husband sent to tell him the baby was coming early.
    “Why don’t you sweep these steps? A man could kill himself trying to get up to your damn door.”
    “Good evening to you, too.” Ty stepped back and Stoneman tramped in, stomping his snowy boots on Mrs. Quick’s just-waxed linoleum floor. Unasked, he shrugged out of his greatcoat and hung it up on the hook next to the door. Tyler noted without surprise the old-fashioned Prince Albert coat, striped trousers, stiff collar and tie that Stoneman wore in all weathers. He didn’t doubt that the old fool had done surgical operations in the outfit, disdaining sterile garb as foolish homages to the “germ theory.”
    One useful feature of the Prince Albert coat was its deep inner pocket, from which Stoneman extracted his familiar pint bottle of gin. “You wouldn’t have a glass and some bitters around, would you, Doctor?” he inquired, as he always did, with the formal but facetious air he affected when he was drinking.
    “I might.” Tyler got the required items, as well as another tepid cup of coffee for himself, and followed Stoneman into the sitting room. Stoneman automatically took the big overstuffed chair with the foot rest, leaving Tyler the narrow spindle back with the uneven front leg. Ty doubted if either of them would ever really come around to thinking of this apartment as his, not Stoneman’s, no matter how long the “new doc” might happen to occupy it.
    “Not squinting into your machine tonight, I see.” Stoneman took a sip of his drink, grimaced, and relaxed back into the chair cushions, stretching his matchstick legs out toward the stove.
    He looked bad tonight. Tyler