“Till this, Chicago was my smallest—the gods be praised!”
“Well, it’s the same in your old smokestack of the universe as it is here!” retorted Bruce. “If you go after the dollar, you’re sane. If you don’t, you’re cracked. Doctor West started off like a winner, so they say; looked like he was going to get a corner on all the patients of Westville. Then, when he stopped practising——”
“You never told me what made him stop.”
“His wife’s death—from typhoid; I barely remember that. When he stopped practising and began his scientific work, the town thought he’d lost his head.”
“And yet two years ago the town was glad enough to get him to take charge of installing its new water system!”
“That’s how it discovered he was somebody. When the city began to look around for an expert, it found no one they could get had a tenth of his knowledge of water supply.”
“That’s the way with your self-worshipping cross-roads towns! You raise a genius—laugh at him, pity his family—till you learn how the outside world respects him. Then—hurrah! Strike up the band, boys! When I think how that old party has been quietly studying typhoid fever and water supply all these years, with you bunch of hayseeds looking down on him as a crank—I get so blamed sore at the place that I wish I’d chucked your letter into the waste-basket when you wrote me to come!”
“It may have been a dub of a town, Billy, but it’ll be the best place in Indiana before we get through with it,” returned the editor confidently. “But whom else did you see?”
“Ran into the Honourable Hiram Cogshell on Main Street, and he slipped me this precious gem.” Billy handed Bruce a packet of typewritten sheets. “Carbon of his to-morrow’s speech. He gave it to me, he said, to save us the trouble of taking it down. The Honourable Hiram is certainly one citizen who’ll never go broke buying himself a bushel to hide his light under!”