A young doctor from Goff had come here to make his professional start. He first took his old schoolmate, Ecky Hamel, to task for calling him by his given name, demanding that he be addressed as “Doctor.” Ecky had gravitated from country school teacher to printer and reporter, and thought he himself was some pumpkins, too. But I don’t think this was held against the Doctor when Ecky wrote the five-line item that touched off the explosion—caused the Doctor to whoop-it-up for a competing paper. The offending item merely said that “Dr. Jermane of Holton, who had operated on Lyman Harvey here last week for appendicitis, had died of a like operation at Holton this week.” A Philadelphia lawyer could have found no fault with this—but the local doctor thought it was a reflection on his professional ability. Knowing that he had brought the Holton doctor here to do the job, and knowing also that the local doctor had been duly recognized in the item reporting the Harvey operation, I thought he had no kick coming — and let it go at that. And anyway, Mr. Harvey had also died of his operation. The complaining doctor was a hustler, socially a good fellow, very much on the way up in his profession, when a catastrophic repercussion reduced him to the level of the ice-man. As attending physician, he had brought into the world an illegitimate child whose birth was a great embarrassment for its little mother and the maternal grandparents. And on a subsequent call at the country home he discovered the child was missing. I am not familiar with the details at this stage of the affair, but rumor had it that the doctor turned sleuth and dug up the fact that the child was buried in the back yard. The home folks, older members of the family, contended that it had died of natural causes—pneumonia, I believe. The doctor was wholly within his rights when he reported the matter to the authorities—but he did not prove an apt witness in court. Two older doctors from the north part of the county, combined and “proved” in effect, on the witness stand that the young doctor did not know enough about such matters to make a case. In the ice business in a southern Kansas town the fellow made good. And though the “injured” doctor had kept on whooping-it-up for a competing paper until he did, with the help of some disgruntled politicians, put me out of the newspaper business, I’m glad to say he was not one to carry a grudge beyond the time of its actual usefulness to him. Just for old friendship’s sake, he wrote me from the office of his artificial ice plant—owned jointly with his brother—complimenting me on one of my articles in W. F. Turrentine’s Spectator. This note on the background of the doctor is given here for reasons which will appear later.