The Chicagoan turned and looked at the lady curiously, and the reporter went on: "The fair-haired lady with the wild-rose face is old Gordon Kimball's daughter; born with a diamond teething ring in her mouth, but has never succeeded in getting anything else of value inside her pretty head."
"Well, she doesn't have to," said the Westerner.
Young Bedford grinned. "That's what Dr. Earl thinks; he can furnish brains for the family. Their engagement was reported two months ago. The man with them is Earl's brother, Frank Earl, corporation lawyer, amateur actor, one of those guys that does everything well, and never gives away his own hand. Go after him for a story about some combination his road has gone into and you come away with a great spiel about bumper crops; always gives you the glad hand, but nothing in it. You'd never take him for Mrs. Ramsey's brother, would you? She's a looker, all right. So is Dr. Earl, one of these big, handsome, powerful-looking men that makes folks ask who he is."
"What's all the hullabaloo about, anyhow?" asked the Chicago man.
"Where have you been that you don't know about Earl?" answered Bedford. "Why, I thought everybody in the country had heard of him. He's the chap that raises the dead, you know; just takes 'em by the hand, makes a few passes, and says, 'Say, it's time to wake up, old fellow,' and the dead one sits up and asks for beefsteak. He's the man that saved Hall, the copper mines king, over in Paris. Hall was finished, all done but putting him in a box, when in comes Dr. Earl. 'Let him alone,' he says. 'He's tired out. When he finishes this nap he'll be just as good as new.' But you know how impetuous the French are, and they were going to have poor old Hall done for, sure enough, when this Earl man stands them off, and promises to bring Hall 'round in six hours. And he does it after the whole bunch of them have parleyed over him and waved looking-glasses across his mouth, and found him as dead as Rameses."
There was a general buzz among the newspaper men, and one of them, older and more dignified in manner than the others, said quietly, "Bedford, you ought not to hand out that kind of fiction, even in your unreliable journal."
Bedford winked slyly at the Chicagoan. "It was my only hope," he said in a rapid aside. "That's Tourney. He was over there at the time, and he'll tell us all about it trying to put me right."
"If you don't like my story you can give us the straight steer yourself, Tourney," he said, and, nothing loath, the older man told how Hall had been suddenly stricken with appendicitis in such severe form that an operation was necessary at once. Upon this the French surgeons agreed, but his heart action was so bad that they dared not administer an anæsthetic, and one of them, who was a noted hypnotist, expressed a doubt whether he would be able to rouse the patient from a hypnosis sufficiently profound to enable them to perform the operation.
"This Frenchman," Tourney went on, warming to his subject, "had seen Earl do some wonderful things and he knew he was in Paris and where he was stopping. He put the case to Hall, and seeing that it was all day with him unless something was done, he told them to send for Earl and they got him there on the double-quick. I was waiting in the hall when he went into the operating room and I stayed there until he came out, and as I had done him one or two good turns he told me about it before he realized that I was a newspaper man. When he saw me last I was coaching Harvard students with more money than brains. That has nothing to do with it, except to show that he isn't one of these 'for publication only' wonder workers."
"Hurry up," said the Chicagoan, "he'll be here in a few minutes, and if he's one of these human clams you are the hope of the press. What did he tell you?"