ould pipe out in the night,
"Tut, tut, Tom--this is no place for you."

But the Doctor was too busy with his own affairs to assume the
guardianship of Tom Van Dorn. As Mayor of Harvey the Doctor made the
young man city attorney, thereby binding the youth to the Mayor in the
feudal system of politics and attaching all the prestige and charm and
talent of the boy to the Doctor's organization.

For Dr. Nesbit in his blithe and cock-sure youth was born to politics as
the sparks fly upward. Men looked to him for leadership and he blandly
demanded that they follow him. He was every man's friend. He knew the
whole county by its first name. The men, the women, the children, the
dogs, the horses knew him and he knew and loved them all. But in return
for his affection he expected loyalty. He was a jealous leader who
divided no honors. Seven months in the year he wore white linen clothes
and his white clad figure bustling through a crowd on Market Street on
Saturday or elbowing its way through a throng at any formal gathering,
or jogging through the night behind his sorrel mare or moving like a
pink-faced cupid, turned Nemesis in a county convention, made him a
marked man in the community. But what was more important, his
distinction had a certain cheeriness about it. And his cheeriness was
vocalized in a high, piping, falsetto voice, generally gay and nearly
always soft and kindly. It expressed a kind of incarnate good nature
that disarmed enmity and drew men to him instinctively. And underneath
his amicability was iron. Hence men came to him in trouble and he healed
their ills, cured their souls, went on their notes and took their hearts
for his own, which carried their votes for his uses. So he became calif
of Harvey.

Even deaf John Kollander who had political aspirations of a high order
learned early that his road to glory led through obedience to the
Doctor. So John went about the county demanding that the men who had
saved the union should govern it and declaring that the flag of his
country should not be trailed in the dust by vandal hands--meaning of
course by "vandal hands" the opposition candidate for register of deeds
or county clerk or for whatever county office John was asking at that
election; and at the convention John's old army friends voted for the
Doctor's slate and in the election they supported the Doctor's ticket.
But tall, deaf John Kollander in his blue army clothes with their brass
buttons and his camp