"All I want is a fair chance," he said doggedly. "And if I don't get it there'll be trouble." He came a step closer. His eyes were down, and he looked dangerous. "See here, Mr. Pigott--if you turn on full-steam same time you seal up the safety-valve, something'll burst. That's science, that is." Mr. Pigott was not at all dismayed. "Now look here!" he said. "You take a pull, young man. You're going altogether too far and too fast. And I'm speaking not as a magistrate but as your old school-master." At the Bowling Green Committee that evening, while the minutes were being read, he retailed the incident to Mr. Trupp. "That little ewe-lamb o yours is turning tiger because he can't have it all his own way," he said. "Going to upset Society because he's not King." Mr. Trupp was amused. "Arrested development," he said. "He's an interesting study in pathology." "Criminal pathology," muttered Mr. Pigott. Whether in the interests of Science, or of expediency, next day Mr. Trupp rolled into Alf's garage, with a blue long-dog, a descendant of the original _She_, wearing the studded collar of her ancestress, at his heels. No man had made a stiffer fight against the new and aggressive locomotive than the great surgeon. Pests of the road, he called them, and refused to recognize his friends when driving them. He affirmed that they upset his horses and his patients; made the place stink; and whirled through the country-side disseminating disease in clouds of dust. But he was no fool, and increasingly busy. A machine that could whisk him over to Lewes in little more than thirty minutes, and land him at the Metropole in Brighton in the hour, was not to be scoffed at. Alf was cleaning his car when Mr. Trupp, greatly muffled in spite of the heat, strolled into his yard. "Look here, Alf," growled the great man. "I'm never going to own one of those things. But I've got to use one to get about. If you like to do my driving we'll arrange something." Alf's attitude to life changed in the twinkling of an eye. He bustled home that evening, a new man. "All O.K.," he called to his mother. "I got me first contract." "What?" she asked sullenly. "Driving for Mr. Trupp." She took a saucepan off the fire. "Then you're a made man," she said; and she did not exaggerate. The job, or as Alf preferred to call it, the contract, meant honour; it meant money; it meant--above all--a start. Mr. Trupp had been for long the first surgeon in Sussex: since the operation, as daring as discreet, by which he had preserved the life of a Balkan Tsar to disgrace a throne, his fame had become world-wide. That evening, uplifted on a wave of humility and thankfulness, Alf walked to Mr. Pigott's house and apologized to him. "I said a lot of silly things, I know," he said. "There is a God and a good God too." Mr. Pigott was sitting with his new wife, who was as much his junior as the first had been his senior.