“Why, I hope to become a lawyer some day,” he replied. “You see, I’m still a student. I’ve studied law a little and mean to take up a regular course next year. But for the present my parents and Doctor Shonto think it best for me to loaf around outdoors.”
“I suppose your folks are wealthy,” said Charmian in her frank way.
“Yes, they’re accounted so. Pop has retired. He was a candy and cracker manufacturer. I’d like to have you meet my mother. She’s a peach. You’d like her. She’d like you, too.”
“And so your hero is Doctor Inman Shonto,” mused Charmian. “I wonder if it would be proper for me to ask you about his work, after he himself has refused to tell me anything?”
“Precious little I can tell you,” laughed Andy. “But I’ll do my best. If Doctor Shonto has any secrets, they’re safe with me because I couldn’t explain them if I wanted to. Fire ahead. Doctor Shonto doesn’t like to talk about himself. He’s entirely too modest.”
“I wanted to ask you,” said the girl, “if Doctor Shonto is in any way responsible for the horrible things I have read about in the papers lately. Rich men hiring thugs to waylay strong, healthy men, knock them out, and take them to doctors, who operate on them and steal their glands, which are substituted for the worn-out glands of the rich men?”
“Nothing doing!” loyally cried Andy. “Doctor Shonto says the most of that news is nothing but hot air. No, he never uses human glands in his work. He uses sheep glands exclusively. And the animals are killed before he cuts the glands out of them.”
“Are you positive?”
“I have only his word for it. But he’s a very tender-hearted man—for a surgeon. And he has a magnificent sense of justice. No, not in a thousand years would Doctor Shonto countenance anything like that.”
“I’m glad to hear you say so,” she sighed. “I think that is simply horrible—ghoulish! But why was it, then, that the doctor refused to tell me anything about his work?”