"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did even better with the other scarecrow."
"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk——"
"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the dance-hall at Durango?"
"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got myself—you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights—into the shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers, is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He spoke a little boastfully, but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig. "Tap that," he said.
He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it, at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the wine.
"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."
"Well?" asked Holt.
"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over twenty-five."
Holt nodded approval.
"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body; that's a cinch," said he.