“Come from far?” he asked with a nice, warm, kindly voice.
“The other side of Dorfield,” I answered.
“So did I, but I live over at Benton. I tell you a country doctor leads some life. One of my old patients has moved beyond Dorfield and nothing would suit him but that I should come and treat him for a bad cold—nothing but a bad cold, mind you! He ’phoned me he was coming down with pneumonia. Here I had to ride ’way over there in all this weather and when I got there, bless you, if the fellow wasn’t having a party. He did have a bad cold. I wish he’d sneeze his head off! That was last night. Yes, I had a good time but it was a mean way to get me to go to a party. My old car won’t stand many such trips. I’ve had it going on fifteen years as it is.
“I had a funny experience coming back from my patient’s. About six miles the other side of Dorfield a man got off the train at a wayside station—Dorset. I reckon he thought he had got to Dorfield, because he seemed rather astonished that there were so few houses in what he had evidently been told was a flourishing town. He’d got Dorfield and Dorset mixed and when the conductor hollered Dorset he thought he’d got where he was going. Said he had a little business to attend to in Dorfield and then was going on beyond, and was mighty glad when I picked him up and gave him a ride. I always give people rides along the country pikes. He wasn’t my kind of passenger though, because he had such a low forehead and a kind of wry neck. I talked along to him and he never answered a word more than just to ask me if that was all the speed I could get out of my old locomotive. I got right peeved, but I never said so.
“When we got to Dorfield he said he’d like me to stop on the corner of Spruce street, as he had a little errand to do. I had to get a pint of iodine and some gauze at the drug store near by, so it suited me very well. It didn’t take me a minute to make my purchases, but, by golly, that fellow was back in the car the minute I was and when we crossed the track and he saw a freight train coming he never said thank you, but jumped out of my car and ran like fun and got onto that car while it was moving, just like Douglas Fairbanks or Harold Lloyd. He was a rum customer, I can tell you.”
“Which way was the freight headed?” I asked.
“West—that six o’clock freight where the engineer plays a tune on his locomotive whistle.”
Ursula had listened to Bob with breathless interest.
“That man’s business in Dorfield was to deliver that letter to your address,” declared Bob. “The doctor in the funny old car had no more to do with it than I had myself.”
“I believe you are right,” agreed Ursula. “And now what next?”