"Anybody dying, old chap?" he would ask, with a curl of his handsome lip. "Hope you'll get to him in time."
It was while in the runabout, however, in the early part of a November afternoon, that the young doctor met his uncle Sim.
"Hello, Thor!" the latter called. "Where you off to? Was looking for you."
Thor brought the machine to a standstill. Uncle Sim threw a long, thin leg over his mare's back and was on the ground. "Whoa, Delia, whoa! Good old girl!"
He liked to believe that the tall bay was spirited. Standing beside Thor's runabout, he held the reins loosely in his left hand, while the right arm was thrown caressingly over Delia's neck. The outward and visible sign of his eccentricity was in his difference from every one else. In a community—one might say a country—in which each man did his utmost to look like every other man, the fact that Simeon Masterman was willing to look like no one but himself was sufficient to prove him, in the language of his neighbors, "a little off." It was sometimes said that he suggested Don Quixote—he was so tall, so gaunt, and so eager-eyed—and, except that there was no melancholy in his face, perhaps he did.
"Got a job for you." The old man's voice was nasal and harsh without being disagreeable.
Grown sensitive, Thor was on his guard. "Not one of your jobs that are given away with a pound of tea?" he said, suspiciously.
"I don't know about the pound of tea—but it's given away. Giving it away because I can't deal with it myself. Calls for some one with more ingenuity—so I've told 'em about you."
Thor laughed. "Don't wonder you're willing to give it up, Uncle Sim."
"You'll wonder still less when you've seen the patient. By the way, it's Fay's wife. 'Member old Fay, don't you?"