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“Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow Bjornstam that always is shooting off his mouth. He’s supposed to of settled down since he got married, but Lord, those fellows that think they know it all, they never change. Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him, all right. He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer’s, and he said, he said to Perce, ‘I’ve always wanted to look at a man that was so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,’ and Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, ‘Have, eh?’ he says. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ve been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend?’ Ha, ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn’t have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten town this is, and Perce come right back at him, ‘If you don’t like this country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you belong!’ Say, maybe us fellows didn’t give Bjornstam the horselaugh though! Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!”

V

Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder’s motor; he stopped at the Kennicotts’; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, “Better come for a ride.”

She wanted to snub him. “Thanks so much, but I’m being maternal.”

“Bring him along! Bring him along!” Bresnahan was out of the seat, stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities were feeble.

She did not bring Hugh along.

Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words. But he looked at her as though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought.

She observed how deep was his chest.

“Lovely fields over there,” he said.

“You really like them? There’s no profit in them.”

He chuckled. “Sister, you can’t get away with it. I’m onto you. You consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. But so are you, my dear—and pretty enough so that I’d try to make love to you, if I weren’t afraid you’d slap me.”

“Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife’s friends? And do you call them ‘sister’?”

“As a matter of fact, I do! And I make ’em like it. Score two!” But his chuckle was not so rotund, and he was very attentive to the ammeter.

In a moment he was cautiously attacking: “That’s a wonderful boy, Will Kennicott. Great work these country practitioners are doing. The other day, in Washington, I was talking to a big scientific shark, a professor in Johns Hopkins medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they’re so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it’s the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed country practitioners I’ve ever met. Eh?”

“I’m sure he is. He’s a servant of reality.”

“Come again? Um. Yes. All of that, whatever that is.... Say, child, you don’t care a whole lot for Gopher Prairie, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Nope.”

“There’s where you’re missing a big chance. There’s nothing to these cities. Believe me, I know! This is a good town, as they go. You’re lucky to be here. I wish I could stay on!”

“Very well, why don’t you?”

“Huh? Why—Lord—can’t get away fr—”

“You don’t have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It’s you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on believing that they live in paradise, and—” She clenched her fist. “The incredible dullness of it!”

“Suppose you were right. Even so, don’t you think you waste a lot of thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!”

“I tell you it