“Nobody competent to treat the case but you?”
Burns looked up. Chester saw his eyes now, gloomy but resolute. “No. It's up to me alone. I owe it to the woman. It's the only child she has left: a girl. It was her boy I sent to a better world with maledictions on his mother's head.”
Comprehension dawned at last on Chester's face. He saw that, taking into consideration Burns's feeling in that matter, there was really nothing to be said. “I hope you win out,” he evolved at length from the confusion of ideas in his mind.
“I hope I do.” Burns rose. “I must send a telegram,” he said, and went to the telephone in the inner office.
While he was there Chester heard the honk of the Imp's horn outside. When Burns came back he opened the outer door and called to Johnny Caruthers, to know if he had obtained the serum for which he had been sent to the druggist. Johnny shouted back that he had. Burns turned to Chester.
“Good night,” he said. “Much obliged for waiting up for me.”
Then, with a certain fighting expression on his lips which Chester had learned to know meant that his whole purpose was set on the attainment of an end for which no price could be too great to pay, Burns went out to Johnny Caruthers and the Green Imp.
CHAPTER XII. IN WHICH HE HAS HIS OWN WAY
“Doc”—Joe Tressler followed Burns down the path, leaving his wife standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed, on the retreating figure of the man who had saved to her her one remaining child—“Doc, we ain't a-goin' to forget this!”