"I don't know," said the doctor. "I know what should have been done long ago—I always do, after trouble has come, and it's too late to remedy it. We should have made ourselves more companionable to Jack, but instead of that, we've only tried to make him a person like ourselves. We're so bound up in our own round of daily affairs that we've never paid much attention to him except when he has got himself into mischief."
"I'm sure I've always seen that he had food and clothing, and you have sent him to school, and given him everything he's asked for that was within reason."
"Within our reason, yes," said the doctor, "but I remember to have had tastes different from my parents, when I was a boy, and they were not at all bad, either."
"I've prayed for him, heaven knows how earnestly," said Mrs. Wittingham.
"So have I," said the doctor, "but I don't cure my patients by prayer. And my own boy, my only son, who has more good qualities than all my patients put together, I've never paid special attention to, except when his ways were irregular. And I am the man whose address—'An Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure,'—made me such a name when I read it before the State Medical Association! Oh, consistency!"
"But what are you going to do, doctor?" asked Mrs. Wittingham. "There's no knowing where he may be, or what he will do—perhaps we'll hear of him in some penitentiary."
"Or in Congress," said the doctor. "He'll be a smart enough rascal to get there, with that busy brain and smart tongue of his."
"But you must do something, doctor," pleaded Mrs. Wittingham.
"I'll tell you what I'll do first," said the doctor springing from his chair; "I'll go and burn up that infernal book on heredity; a man who can't understand his own flesh and blood, isn't fit to write about those of the rest of the race. Then I'll hire both constables to track him, first swearing them to secrecy. I guess I won't burn the book, though—I'll learn enough by this experience to tell the truth instead of running a lot of theories on the public."
The constables were on the road in an hour, and the doctor, pleading a sudden call out of town, turned over his patients to the least disagreeable of his rivals, and took the road himself. But no one seemed to have seen Jack. Matt knew nothing about him, and the doctor reached home at midnight looking as many years older as he certainly was, wiser and sadder.