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Young Doctor Malone the night they rushed for the nearest hospital, some twenty miles away at the county seat. There Jerry encountered a shocking setback. Dr. Jones, chief of staff, had heard of the petition to remove Jerry as Health Officer of Belmore and when Jerry arrived, expecting the operating room to be ready, an embarrassed resident physician had the unpleasant duty of telling him that permission to use the hospital had been withheld. Dr. Jones had ordered the operation delayed until he could arrive to perform it himself. JERRY had no choice. He waited, J watching the fluttering pulse of Mr. Mead grow weaker as his fever mounted. Dr. Jones was due in half an hour. But in half an hour, the poison would have spread, Mr. Mead would be beyond help. The situation was desperate. Jerry took matters into his own hands, demanded the surgery, ordered the anesthetic. By the time Dr. Jones arrived, Jerry was working swiftly under the brilliant white lights of the operating room, every ounce of his skill mustered for the slim chance of saving the old man's ebbing life. Jerry did not look up when Dr. Jones entered the operating theater. He did not look at him until the last precise move in the delicate job was made. Dr. Jones waited, severe, unsmiling. "I'll see you in my office when you've finished scrubbing up, Dr. (Continued from page 19) Malone," he said as he strode out of the operating room. Jerry gave Ann a long look. "This fixes me!" he said flatly. "Looks like the farewell performance of Dr. Malone, general practitioner." "That was as fine a piece of work as I've ever seen, doctor," said Dr. Jones with unexpected cordiality, when Jerry walked wearily into his office. "Sorry I delayed you, but evidently you don't know there's a lot more than skill needed in general practice. Lots of politics, in our profession. This move to oust you as Health Officer has been brought to the attention of the State Health Department by influential people. I was asked to investigate and I'm very glad I can turn in an entirely favorable report as to your competency." "Thank you, doctor," said Jerry gratefully. "This makes me feel that maybe my luck is turning." There Jerry was wrong. His luck was set dead against him and its tide was running strong. He answered a call to the slum-like cottages of the factory workers, without a hint of the disaster that was to follow his hopeless attempt to save the life of a boy who had been neglected for days, who was dying even as he walked in the door. The injection he gave to fan the faint spark of life long enough to get the patient to the hospital, was of no avail. Even as he withdrew the needle, the boy sighed, and died. "You've killed him, and you're gonna pay for it!" shouted Mike, big, bullying brother of the dead boy. "I saw you! All he had was a bad cold and you stuck that needle in him and he died. I'll get you for this, and I'll get you good! We bin warned you was full of fancy notions. . . ." Jerry paid little attention, thinking the man's anger would pass away as he grew used to the shock of his brother's death. BUT there he reckoned without Mike and without Bogert, for whom Mike worked. The factory owner had been waiting for just such a chance to pay back Jerry for his order to remove the refuse dump. Bogert lent a willing ear to Mike's accusations, fanned the flame of Mike's anger by sympathetic questions, watched with sly satisfaction, as Mike raved himielf into a mood for action. Mike expended some of that urge toward action by lifting his elbow a good many times too often at a bar where his rowdy friends met. That night, about the time that Jerry was getting ready for bed, an angry mob hurried through the streets, Mike in the lead, roaring for tar and feathers and a rail on which to run the new doctor out of town. Will Prout was funny, but he was also fearless. He ran for help to Ted Hudson, the editor of Belmore's only newspaper, who had become one of Jerry's few fast friends in the town. Together the men reached Jerry's gate just as the young doctor planted ■sMsM! APRIL, 1940 77