"But—"
"The Director said, if you wanted to come, I could take you."
"Where are we going, Mr. Burns?"
"New York."
"What for?"
"Seems to me, Alavero," said the Inspector, turning to the Porto Rican, "that you've been teaching this lad to ask questions. Out of the four remarks he has made since I came in, two have been questions. Fifty per cent is a high average. Well, I'll tell you," he added, turning to the boy, "it's just this: there are always some cities that aren't satisfied with the census. I believe of the cities of over thirty thousand inhabitants at this census there has been something like nine, decimal-eight-one per cent protests, and the most necessary of these the Bureau investigates. Perhaps ten or a dozen in the entire country get a recount. The Bureau doesn't officially recognize some of them but sends an inspector to look over the ground, and see if everything was done right. That's what we're going to do in New York."
"All right," said Hamilton briefly.
"You'll be on that train?"
"Yes, Mr. Burns," the boy answered. "Eleven-fifty P.M., Tuesday."
The opportunity was one which Hamilton had been coveting, for he felt that if he only had a chance to get at the city methods he would have covered almost the entire ground of the field-work of the Decennial Census, and while he was sorry to leave his Porto Rican friend, still the novelty appealed to him greatly, and in spite of his former chief's mathematical conversation, Hamilton was genuinely fond of him.