Plotting the Short Story (by Culpeper Chunn - 1922)

DOCTOR X (A FIVE-MINUTE TALE)

Our old professor, Sven Borgen, has become famous almost over night," I remarked, glancing up from the morning paper. "You remember him, don't you, Pat?"

"Sure," returned McKane, lazily flicking an imaginary speck of dust from his burnt-orange tie. "The Swede who used to lecture on psychology at G. W. I. during our last year there. He was bowlegged and had a cast in his right eye. Erratic nut, what? We used to call him Bug. What has he done now? Proclaimed himself emperor of Wuzu or eloped with his grandmother?" 

"Nothing of such international concern," I said. "But he appears to have gotten himself in the limelight just the same. A few days ago it became known that he had perfected an operation for grafting the brain of an animal in the cranium of another animal of the same species, in much the same way, as I understand it, that living tissue and bone are grafted on human beings."

"Ah!" rejoined McKane, and yawned. "What is Consolidated Steel quoted at this morning?"

"His experiments have been successful to a degree almost past belief," I continued, ignoring his question. "The paper says that out of fifth operations performed on dogs and other small mammals only two proved fatal. These operations, the account continues, have been performed chiefly on living animals, but in one case at least the brain of a live dog was grafted in the cranium of a dog killed by concussion of the brain. The dead dog was brought to life."

"Tough on the first pup," Pat commented.

"Although Borgen's experiments have been confined to animal subjects," I resumed, "he was recently granted permission by the Swedish authorities to experiment with incurable patients in an asylum for the insane, but on the very day the story was given out to the papers -- which, by the way, are playing it up big -- he was run over by a street car and instantly killed."

"Lucky devil," said McKane, without much interest. "If he had lived he would have ended his days in a dippy-house. Brain-graft? Pooh! The man had ants in his attic."

"I don't know so much about that," I rejoined. "The paper says--"

"Bunk!" McKane interrupted rudely.

"The paper says," I continued doggedly, "that he--"

"Piffle!"

"You are wrong," interposed a quiet voice behind us. "'Piffle' is scarcely the word. The story about Doctor Borgen in the morning papers is quite true. I happen to know the facts in the case."

I turned my head sharply and gazed at the speaker. He had stopped directly behind my chair and was gazing over my shoulder at the paper spread over my knees.

He was a tall man of uncertain age and nationality, although there was an elusive something about him that suggested Scandinavian. He had saturnine face the color of old parchment, a hawklike nose, and a pair of glittering blue eyes that appeared greenly iridescent when one gazed into their depths. He was dressed in a shabby black suit of clothes, wore a slouch hat pulled down over his forehead, and a well-known brand of cigarette hung from between his thin red lips.

An unprepossessing person, in short, and yet, strangely enough, one who at once roused my interest.

"And who the devil might you be?" asked McKane, looking him up and down with an insolent eye."

"I bet your pardon," returned the stranger, without embarrassment, "I happened to hear the tail-end of your conversation as I was passing, and as Doctor Borgen once honored me with his friendship, I could not let your statement touching his mental condition pass unchallenged. Sven Borgen was not a lunatic, as you seem to think, but a genius whose death will prove a sad blow to science."