Page:Waifs and Strays (1917).djvu/205

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE AMAZING GENIUS OF O. HENRY
187

credentials, “was a good street man: and he was more than that—he respected his profession and was satisfied with 300 per cent. profit. He had plenty of offers to go into the illegitimate drug and garden seed business, but he was never to be tempted off the straight path.”

Andy and Jeff take counsel together in long debate on the porch of the hotel.

And here, apparently, a piece of good luck came to Jeff’s help. The very next morning a messenger brings word that the Mayor of the town is suddenly taken ill. The only doctor of the place is twenty miles away. Jeff Peters is summoned to the Mayor’s bedside. . . . “This Mayor Banks,” Jeff relates, “was in bed all but his whiskers and feet. He was making internal noises that would have had everybody in San Francisco hiking for the parks. A young man was standing by the bedside holding a cup of water. . . .” Mr. Peters, called to the patient’s side, is very cautious. He draws attention to the fact that he is not a qualified practitioner, is not “a regular disciple of S. Q. Lapius.”

The Mayor groans in pain. The young man at the bedside, introduced as Mr. Biddle, the Mayor’s nephew, urges Mr. Peters—or Doctor Waugh-hoo—in the name of common humanity to attempt a cure.

Finally Jeff Peters promises to treat the Mayor by “scientific demonstration.” He proposes, he says, to make use of the “great doctrine of psychic financiering—of the enlightening school of long-distance

187