Double Feature
Well, you know me! Old brain-like-a-fish Blakeson. I stared at him foolishly for a moment, then, when he said no more about it, decided Hank had finally developed, along with his many other virtues, a sense of humor. So I chuckled, and he chuckled with me, and we went to bed a little while later, and I proceeded to forget all about it.
It didn't even dawn on me, when the next morning he went out and came home with a couple armloads of wires, tubes and miscellaneous doogadgets, that he meant business. He was always prancing home with some kind of lab equipment or other—you know how amateur scientists are.
So I went ahead with my duties, which were plugging the sale of U. S. Government Bonds and Stamps—and, by the way, you better buy 'em, kiddies!—and three days whisked by as days have a habit of doing.
Then Travis Tomkins, chief technician of the observatory, halted me one day on the street.
"Say, Blakeson, where's Cleaver hiding himself? He promised to help me plot the orbit on that new comet he and I discovered."
"He and you!" I snorted. "Where do you get the community spirit? All you did was point the telescope where Hank told you! Oh—he's places, doing things. I'll tell him you want him."
And less than an hour later I bumped into H. Logan MacDowell, himself, in person, and not the captive balloon he looked like, to meet the same query.
"James, my dear lad," puffed the erstwhile Prexy of our former Alma Mammy. "I have been endeavoring to ascertain the whereabouts of our erudite rural companion. If you could enlighten me—"
"If you mean," I interpreted, "where's Hank, I guess he's home."