“All right.” The young fellow recrossed his feet upon the window-sill. “But, Arn,” he drawled, “this certainly is a slow old burg you’ve dragged me down into. If one of your leading citizens wants to catch the seven-thirty to Indianapolis to-morrow morning, I suppose he sets his alarm to go off day before yesterday.”

“What’s soured on your stomach now?” demanded the editor.

“Oh, the way it took this suburb of Nowhere thirty years to wake up to Doctor West! [Pg 9]Every time I see him I feel sore for hours afterward at how this darned place has treated the old boy. If your six-cylinder, sixty-horse power, seven-passenger tongues hadn’t remembered that his grandfather had founded Westville, I bet you’d have talked him out of the town long ago.”

[Pg 9]

“The town didn’t understand him.”

“I should say it didn’t!” agreed the reporter.

“And I guess you don’t understand the town,” said the editor, a little sharply. “Young man, you’ve never lived in a small place.”

“Till this, Chicago was my smallest—the gods be praised!”

“Well, it’s the same in your old smokestack of the universe as it is here!” retorted Bruce. “If you go after the dollar, you’re sane. If you don’t, you’re cracked. Doctor West started off like a winner, so they say; looked like he was going to get a corner on all the patients of Westville. Then, when he stopped practising——”

“You never told me what made him stop.”

“His wife’s death—from typhoid; I barely remember that. When he stopped practising and began his scientific work, the town thought he’d lost his head.”

“And yet two years ago the town was glad enough to get him to take charge of installing its new water system!”

[Pg 10]

[Pg 10]

“That’s how it discovered he was somebody. When the city began to look around for an expert, it found no one they could get had a tenth of his knowledge of water supply.”

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