Horsesense Hank in the parallel worlds

By NELSON S. BOND
What if Washington hadn't crossed the Delaware? Horsesense Hank found the strange answer when he traveled into the past.
The whole damn thing was Jamieson's fault. He was a snippy sort of somebody, anyway, even if he was head of the U. S. government's physics research department. He liked nothing more than to fling his physical and mental weight around. Because he had an exaggerated amount of the first, and an exaggerated opinion of the second, he riled Hank Cleaver worse than boils on the postscript.
It ain't jest whut he says, Jim, Hank groused one night. That don't matter. There's jest two opinions: right and wrong, logical an' illogical. As a human bein', it's his priv'lege to think as screwy as he wants. But, dag-gone, it's the way he says things! Like he was the oney one had a speck o' common-sense! Now, if I didn't have a little bit, would I be here?
That question needed no answer. Hank was here—in Washington, D. C.—simply and solely because the men who run our nation had finally recognized his peculiar abilities.
Horsesense Hank Cleaver was not an educated man in the formal sense of the phrase. He had never completed college or high school, and it is an even money bet that he never got much farther than the sixth grade of the rural grammar school near his Lower Westville farm. But he had something greater, more important, than mere book-larnin'. He had a gift for determining the answers to problems of any scientific nature by means of plain, old-fashioned, common-sense horse-logic.
Now a grateful government had transferred him to the nation's capital, where his straightforward reasoning might be at the service of the President himself ... and because Hank Cleaver and Jim Blakeson are as inseparable as corn pone and chitlins, I was here with him.
As a matter of fact, dear old Washington-on-the-Potomac was beginning to look like an overgrown Midland U. campus. H. Logan MacDowell, president of the college, was here as a dollar a year man —and worth every penny of it!—while his charming daughter, Helen, Hank's fiancée, was working in the U.S.O. headquarters.