Besides, it was hard to ask questions of a man whose eyes were dark with unhappiness and whose face was drawn and sad and always wistful. For nearly four years that very question had been on the tip of Mr. Baxter’s tongue, struggling for release. He had always succeeded in holding it back. And now, before he knew what he was about, he let go and out it came. He was petrified. “Not lately,” said Mr. Sage, quietly. Whereupon, for no reason at all, Mr. Baxter cackled inanely. CHAPTER VII THE MINISTER’S WIFE Rumley had not stood still during the decade. It was the proud boast of its most enterprising citizen, Silas Link, that it had done a great deal better than Chicago: it had tripled its population. And, he proclaimed, all “she” had to do was to keep on tripling her population every ten years and “she” would be a city of nearly half a million souls in 1950. It was all very simple, he explained. All you had to do was to multiply fifteen hundred (the approximate population in 1900), by three and you would have forty-five hundred in 1910. “Work it out yourself,” he was wont to say, “if you don’t believe me. If we keep on multiplying we’ll have 364,500 population fifty years from now.” The prize pupil in the South Rumley school, Freddy Chuck, aged thirteen, went even further than Mr. Link in his calculations. He carried the matter up to the year 2000 and proved conclusively that if the ratio could be maintained for a hundred years, Rumley would have something like 88,303,500 inhabitants at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Freddy was looked upon as a mathematical “shark.” The North Rumley school, presided over by Mr. Elwell, contained no such prodigy, but it did have an exceedingly promising half-back in the person of Oliver October Baxter.