“It has come to our attention, by a curious chance, that you are on the eve of your most significant discovery. We all wondered, when you left academic work, at your decision to enter the commercial field. We wished that you had cared to come to us.”
“You would have taken me in? I needn’t at all have come here?”
“Naturally! Now from what we hear, you are not giving your attention to the commercial side of things, and that tempts us to wonder whether you could be persuaded to join us at McGurk. So I just sprang on a train and ran down here. We should be delighted to have you become a member of the institute, and chief of the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. Mr. McGurk and I desire nothing but the advancement of science. You would, of course, have absolute freedom as to what researches you thought it best to pursue, and I think we could provide as good assistance and material as would be obtainable anywhere in the world. In regard to salary—permit me to be business-like and perhaps blunt, as my train leaves in one hour— I don’t suppose we could equal the doubtless large emolument which the Hunziker people are able to pay you, but we can go to ten thousand dollars a year—”
“Oh, my God, do not talk of the money! I shall be wit’ you in New York one week from to-day. You see,” said Gottlieb, “I haf no contract here!”
CHAPTER XIV
I
All afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breeze about them was flowing sunshine.
Martin cried to Leora, “I feel as if all the Zenith dust and hospital lint were washed out of my lungs. Dakota. Real man’s country. Frontier. Opportunity. America!”
From the thick swale the young prairie chickens rose. As he watched them sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit was part of the great land, and he was almost freed of the impatience with which he had started out from Wheatsylvania.
“If you’re going driving, don’t forget that supper is six o’clock, sharp,” Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugar-coat it.