Of course there were certain narrow, quibbling spirits, just as there are in every hamletto, who objected to Ed always chiseling in on everything, but there were not lacking those who, like Jeff Webster, Sole Owner and Proprietor of Webster’s Bus Line, believed that Ed Galloway had pretty near the right hashish on things, nine times out of ten. Away off somewhere in Thibet or in Sumatra there may have been some petty local question that Ed was not wisdomed-up on, but everything that took on the character of a national or international issue, he could discuss from basement to belfry. He was as much at home in the busy arena of Politics and Business as he was in the wide realm of Science and Philosophy. There was one thing that Ed had in common with all great political leaders, whether they were fully aware of it or not. It was a positive, ultimatum-like tone in which he rendered his decisions in all cases, regardless of their importance to you, to him and/or to the world at large. If, for instance, Ed happened to pass a cup of water from the Court House pump to the stranger within the gates, he would say: “That water, Sir, is the purest, freshest water in this here whole State.” He’d say it with a sweep of the arm that seemed to include not only the State but the whole Universe, neither of which territories had he ever canvassed. And invariably the stranger, after drinking the ordinary every-day water from the ordinary every-day Court House pump, would smack his lips and agree with Ed and have another go at it. Now everybody in every town of every State of every Nation says the same thing about the water of his particular pump, and there is nothing of news-value either in this observation on our part, or in the statement re pure water on the part of said kanoops the world over. But whenever Ed Galloway up and said that water was pure, or the Tariff was doomed, or that Stocks would go to a New Low, or that we were going to have rain, you had a sense that here was a man who undoubtedly had a corner on all outstanding knowledge of the subject. Ed’s words always carried a certain vanadium finality that clinched the case and demoralized rebuttal, but there was always left in the heart of the Vanquished a sort of half-formed desire to call Ed a liar on general principles, although with no hopes of course of proving it; for Ed was always there with The Figures, which he dug up out of the vasty deep of his Imagination to support his side of the case, while his opponent usually was equipped with nothing but a village vocab of short jerky monosyllables and a chew of tobacco. One day Ed met the owner of the Plow Factory in the barber’s chair getting his chinchillas chipped and told him right off the keyboard that his plant was doing but 8-3/4 percent of the total plow business of the county.