Outside, Kennedy grasped my arm.
“You’ll do that, Walter?” he asked persuasively. “Spencer is a client that one doesn’t get every day. Just drop into the Star office and give them the straight story, I’ll promise you I’ll not take another case until you are free again to go on with me in it.”
There was no denying him. As briefly as I could I rehearsed the main facts to the managing editor late that night. I was too tired to write it at length, yet I could not help a feeling of satisfaction as he exclaimed, “Great stuff, Jameson,—great.”
“I know,” I replied, “but this six-cylindered existence for a week wears you out.”
“My dear boy,” he persisted, “if I had turned some one else loose on that story, he’d have been dead. Go to it—it’s fine.”
It was a bit of blarney, I knew. But somehow or other I liked it. It was just what I needed to encourage me, and I hurried uptown promising myself a sound sleep at any rate.
“Very good,” remarked Kennedy the next morning, poking his head in at my door and holding up a copy of the Star into which a very accurate brief account of the affair had been dropped at the last moment. “I’m going over to the laboratory. See you there as soon as you can get over.”
“Craig,” I remarked an hour or so later as I sauntered in on him, hard at work, “I don’t see how you stand this feverish activity.”
“Stand it?” he repeated, holding up a beaker to the light to watch a reaction. “It’s my very life. Stand it? Why, man, if you want me to pass away—stop it. As long as it lasts, I shall be all right. Let it quit and I’ll—I’ll go back to research work,” he laughed.
Evidently he had been waiting for me, for as he talked, he laid aside the materials with which he had been working and was preparing to go out.