erned, truly sympathetic, to
express, in a beautiful and perfect way, his lasting interest in his
one-time assistant. Not far behind him had come Mr. Hickok, the director
who looked like James E. Winter, who had often chatted with the
assistant editor in times gone by, and who spoke confidently of the day
when he would come back to the _Post_. Beverley Byrd had come, too,
manly and friendly; Plonny Neal, ill at ease for once in his life; Evan
Montague, of the _Post_, had asked to be allowed to make the
arrangements for the funeral; Buck Klinker had actually made those
arrangements. Better than most of these, perhaps, were the young men of
the Mercury, raw, embarrassed, genuine young men, who, stopping him on
the street, did not seem to know why they stopped him, who, lacking
West's verbal felicity, could do nothing but take his hand, hot with the
fear that they might be betrayed into expressing any feeling, and
stammer out: "Doc, if you want anything--why dammit, Doc--you call on
_me_, hear?"

Best of all had been Buck Klinker--Buck, who had made him physically,
who had dragged him into contact with life over his own protests, who
had given him the first editorial he ever wrote that was worth
reading--Buck, the first real friend he had ever had. It was to Buck
that he had telephoned an hour after his father's death, for he needed
help of a practical sort at once, and his one-time trainer was the man
of all men to give it to him. Buck had come, constrained and silent; he
was obviously awed by the Doc's sudden emergence into stunning
notoriety. To be Surface's son was, to him, like being the son of
Iscariot and Lucrezia Borgia. On the other hand, he was aware that, of
Klinkers and Queeds, a Surface might proudly say: "There are no such
people." So he had greeted his friend stiffly as Mr. Surface, and was
amazed at the agitation with which that usually impassive young man had
put a hand upon his shoulder and said: "I'm the same Doc always to you,
Buck, only now I'm Doc Surface instead of Doc Queed." After that
everything had been all right. Buck had answered very much after the
fashion of the young men of the Mercury, and then rushed off to arrange
for the interment, and also to find for Doc Surface lodgings somewhere
which heavily undercut Mrs. Paynter's modest prices.

The sudden discovery that he was not alone in the world, that he had
friends in it, real friends who believed in him and whom nothing could
ever take aw