Pete Yeska said:
“Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when I heard you were going! Course you and me have scrapped about this drug business, but Lord! I been kind of half thinking about coming around some time and offering you a partnership and let you run the drug end to suit yourself, and we could get the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice little business. I’m real sorry you’re going to leave us.... Well, come back some day and we’ll take a shot at the ducks, and have a good laugh about that bull you made over the small-pox. I never will forget that! I was saying to the old woman just the other day, when she had an ear-ache, ‘Ain’t got small-pox, have yuh, Bess!’”
Dr. Hesselink said:
“Doctor, what’s this I hear? You’re not going away? Why, you and I were just beginning to bring medical practise in this neck of the woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over to-night— Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate you. Small place like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to keep busy. Why, Doctor, I’ve been watching you develop from an unlicked cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you’re going away—you don’t know how I feel!”
Henry Novak said:
“Why, Doc, you ain’t going to leave us? And we got a new baby coming, and I said to the woman, just the other day, ‘It’s a good thing we got a doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this guff we used to get from Doc Winter.’”
The wheat-buyer at Delft said:
“Doc, what’s this I hear? You ain’t going away? A fellow told me you was and I says to him, ‘Don’t be more of a damn’ fool than the Lord meant you to be,’ I says. But I got to worrying about it, and I drove over and— Doc, I fire off my mouth pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you in the typhoid epidemic, when you said that seamstress was carrying the sickness around, and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you’d like to be state senator, and if you’ll stay— I got quite a little influence—believe me, I’ll get out and work my shirt off for you!”
Alec Ingleblad said:
“You’re a lucky guy!”