THE DREAM DOCTOR
I
THE DREAM DOCTOR
“Jameson, I want you to get the real story about that friend of yours, Professor Kennedy,” announced the managing editor of the Star, early one afternoon when I had been summoned into the sanctum.
From a batch of letters that had accumulated in the litter on the top of his desk, he selected one and glanced over it hurriedly.
“For instance,” he went on reflectively, “here’s a letter from a Constant Reader who asks, ‘Is this Professor Craig Kennedy really all that you say he is, and, if so, how can I find out about his new scientific detective method?’”
He paused and tipped back his chair.
“Now, I don’t want to file these letters in the waste basket. When people write letters to a newspaper, it means something. I might reply, in this case, that he is as real as science, as real as the fight of society against the criminal. But I want to do more than that.”
The editor had risen, as if shaking himself momentarily loose from the ordinary routine of the office.
“You get me?” he went on, enthusiastically, “In other words, your assignment, Jameson, for the next month is to do nothing except follow your friend Kennedy. Start in right now, on the first, and cross-section out of his life just one month, an average month. Take things just as they come, set them down just as they happen, and when you get through give me an intimate picture of the man and his work.”