aterial."

Colonel Dodd meditated, pulling on his wisp of whisker.

"It's one thing to encourage enterprise in this state--it's another
thing to be everlastingly paying rake-offs to local promoters who grab
a franchise when we're not looking and then hold us up. I don't want to
hurt the Danburg men. But my stockholders expect certain things of me
and it's about time men in this state understand that we propose to
control the water question. Snell, you go and talk to those Danburg men
like a father to children. Send them in here smoothed down and we'll do
the right thing by them."

He signaled for Briggs and told him to admit Dr. Dohl.

The doctor, chairman of the State Board of Health, was a chubby man with
a tow-colored, fan-shaped beard. He sat down and sprung his eye-glasses
on his bulgy nose and drew out a package of manuscript.

"Colonel, I have felt it my duty to write a special chapter on the
typhoid situation in this state for the report of the State Board of
Health."

"Very well, Doctor." The colonel was curt and his tone admitted nothing
of his sentiments.

"DO you care to listen to it? It rather vitally concerns the
Consolidated Water Company."

"You don't blame us for all these typhoid cases, do you?"

"No, sir--not for all of them."

"Why blame us for any of them? Our analyses show that we're giving clean
water. How about dirty milkmen and the sanitary arrangements in these
tenement-houses and all such? It's the fashion to blame a corporation
for everything bad that happens in this world."

"We have placed blame on milkmen where any blame is due," stated Dr.
Dohl. He tapped his manuscript. "But I have spent considerable of my
department's money in making a house-to-house canvass, tracing the
sources. The man before me _guessed_. I have made _sure_! Colonel Dodd,
the Consolidated water is pretty poisonous stuff these days."

"What's the matter in this state all of a sudden?" snapped the colonel.
"I am told that a lunatic almost broke up our city government meeting
the other night, shouting that the Consolidated is trying to poison
folks. You're too level-headed a man to get into that class, Dr. Dohl."

"I'll allow you to set me down in any class which seems fitting from
your point of view," replied the doctor, stiffly. "But if that lunatic,
as you call him, got an angle-worm or a frog's leg out of his tap I
don't blame him for breaking up a meeting of the city government which
will tolerate t