"Well, it ain't exactly that, Jim. Only—"
"Only what?"
"Only," he gulped, "them chips ain't gonna do much good, way I figger. 'Pears to me like after what happened tonight, that there place ain't never gonna open up no more."
He was right, of course. Hank was always right. I still have two hatfuls of roulette chips; you can have them, parcel post collect. The College Clubbe folded the next morning, but the story of why it collapsed got around. And Hank became something of a celebrity.
That's how, in spite of Doc MacDowell's pigheadedness, the rest of the Midland University faculty got to hear about my rural protégé. To hear was to visit; to visit was to listen with awe. They handed him stumpers; he up-rooted them and handed them back with Q.E.D.'s tacked on them.
With calm nonchalance Hank Cleaver answered the questions of the incredulous scientists.
At first, Horse-sense Hank was a sort of perambulating parlor game to the professoriat. They came and tried out on him the trick questions to which they—and presumably only they—knew the answers. No soap! They asked him about the variable nature of light waves; he derived, alone and unaided, a formula which Professor Hallowell of the Physics Department identified as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.