By the speed with which the Green Imp swallowed the ground it looked as if Burns might make several such trips and still interpolate a number of “five-minute stops” before the affair at the Chester house should be over. Before his passengers were well aware of the distance they had covered he pulled up in front of a small cottage. They settled themselves comfortably to await a fifteen-minute stay, but in five he was out again. Both dust coat and clawhammer were off—his sleeves were rolled to the elbow.
“I'm in for it, boys,” he said. “Can't get away under two hours at the shortest. Sorry. But they didn't let me know what they wanted me for, and I'm caught. You'll have to drive home. Call up Johnny Caruthers and let him bring back the Imp and Miss Mathewson. I can't be spared long enough to go myself, so take her this note to tell her what to bring. Get busy, now.”
He handed Macauley a hasty scrawl on a prescription blank, and smiled at the discomfited faces of his two friends showing plainly in the lights which streamed from the house.
“You look blamed pleased over your job,” growled Macauley.
“I like the job all right,” admitted Burns; “particularly when contrasted with—”
“You wouldn't say it if you'd caught one glimpse of Mrs. L.” called back Chester, as the Imp responded somewhat erratically to Macauley's unaccustomed touch. But all the answer they got was, an emphatic “Don't change gears as if you were running a thrashing machine, Mac.”
It was two hours and a half later that Burns came out of the small cottage again, wiping a damp face, his white shirt-front a pathetic ruin, his hastily reassumed white waistcoat and tie decidedly the worse for having been carelessly handled. But his face, when he turned it toward the stars as he crossed the tiny patch of a flower-bordered yard, was a contented one.
“It pays up all the arrears when you can leave a chunk of happiness behind you as big as that one,” he said to himself. Johnny Caruthers had gone home by trolley long ago, and Miss Mathewson was to remain for the night and return with the doctor when he came for his morning after-visit. Burns sent the Green Imp off at a moderate pace, musing as he drove through the now moderated and refreshing air of two o'clock in the morning.
“Party must be about over by now; think it'll adjourn without seeing any more of Red Pepper and his misused dress clothes,” he reflected. “I suppose those dancing puppets think they've had a good time, but it isn't in it with mine. Bless the little woman: she's happy over her first boy! He's a winner, too. As for Tom, I could have tipped him over with a nod of the head when he was thanking me for leaving the merry-go-round to stand by. It must feel pretty good to be the father of a promising specimen like that. Must beat the adopting business several leagues. And that's not saying that Bobby Burns isn't the best thing that ever happened to R. P.”
Philosophizing thus, he presently sent the Green Imp at her quietest pace in at the home driveway. The Chester house was still brilliantly illumined; his own dark except for the dim light in the office and—he discovered it as he rounded the turn—a sort of half-radiance coming from the windows of his own room, where Bob slept in the small bed beside his own. Burns gazed anxiously at this, for it showed that somebody had turned on the hooded electric. He was accustomed to leave the door open into his private office; in which a light was always burning, and with this Bob had hitherto been satisfied.