oming a D. V.
M. (though to tell the truth the profession suited him well enough,
being the nearest possible approach to realizing his ambition) solely
because the veterinary college in Tampa was near enough to Landsdale
for commuting and because his later practice could be carried on under
the guiding aegis of his personal matriarchy. The virtuous, and vapid,
Orella Simms became his fiancee by the same tactics and for the same
reasons.

Oliver _had_ considered rebellion, of course, but common sense
discouraged the idea. He had no intimates outside his family nor any
experience with the world beyond Landsdale and Tampa, and his
fledgling self-confidence invariably bogged down in a welter of
introspective apprehensions when he thought of running away. Where
would he go, and to whom could he turn in emergency?

Such was the character and condition of Oliver Watts when his newly
undertaken practice of veterinary medicine threw him into the company
of "Mr. Thomas Furnay" and of a girl whose name, as nearly as it can
be rendered into English, was Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above. Their
advent brought Oliver face to face for the first time in his sedentary
life with High Adventure--with adventure so high, as a matter of fact,
that it took him literally and bodily out of this humdrum world.

* * * * *

The initial step was taken when Mr. Furnay, known to Landsdale as a
wealthy and eccentric old recluse who had recently leased a walled
property on Federal Route 27 that had once been the winter retreat of
a Prohibition-era gangster, was driven by emergency to call upon
Oliver for professional service. Mr. Furnay usually kept very much to
himself behind his iron-grilled gates and his miles of stuccoed wall;
but it happened that in pursuit of his business (whose true nature
would have confounded Landsdale to its insular core) he had just
bought up the entire menagerie of an expiring circus billed as
Skadarian Brothers, and it was the sudden illness of one of his newly
acquired animals that forced him to breach his isolation.

Mr. Furnay called at the Watts place in his town car, driven by a
small, dark and taciturn chauffeur named Bivins. He found Oliver at
work in his neatly ordered clinic at the rear of the big house, busily
spooning cod-liver oil into a trussed and thoroughly outraged chow
named Champ.

"I have a sick animal," Mr. Furnay stated tersely. He was a slight man
with a moderately