A vote of thanks was carried, and then I found myself shaking
hands with Ivery while Blenkiron stood a yard off, talking to one
of the Misses Weekes. The next moment I was being introduced.

'Mr Brand, very pleased to meet you,' said the voice I knew so
well. 'Mr Ivery has been telling me about you, and I guess we've
got something to say to each other. We're both from noo countries,
and we've got to teach the old nations a little horse-sense.'

Mr Ivery's car - the only one left in the neighbourhood - carried
us to his villa, and presently we were seated in a brightly-lit dining-
room. It was not a pretty house, but it had the luxury of an
expensive hotel, and the supper we had was as good as any London
restaurant. Gone were the old days of fish and toast and boiled
milk. Blenkiron squared his shoulders and showed himself a
noble trencherman.

'A year ago,' he told our host, 'I was the meanest kind of
dyspeptic. I had the love of righteousness in my heart, but I had the
devil in my stomach. Then I heard stories about the Robson
Brothers, the star surgeons way out west in White Springs,
Nebraska. They were reckoned the neatest hands in the world at
carving up a man and removing devilments from his intestines.
Now, sir, I've always fought pretty shy of surgeons, for I considered
that our Maker never intended His handiwork to be reconstructed
like a bankrupt Dago railway. But by that time I was feeling so
almighty wretched that I could have paid a man to put a bullet
through my head. "There's no other way," I said to myself. "Either
you forget your religion and your miserable cowardice and get cut