Chapter II
BUT he was not a boy. He was fifty and a Colonel of Infantry in the Army of the United States and to pass a physical examination that he had to take the day before he came down to Venice for this shoot, he had taken enough mannitol hexanitrate to, well he did not quite know what to—to pass, he said to himself.
The surgeon had been quite skeptical. But he noted the readings after taking them twice.
“You know, Dick,” he said. “It isn’t indicated; in fact it is definitely contra-indicated in increased intra-ocular and intra-cranial pressure.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” the shooter, who was not a shooter, then, except potentially, and was a Colonel of Infantry in the Army of the United States, reduced from being a general officer, said.
“I have known you a long time, Colonel. Or maybe it just seems a long time,” the surgeon told him.
