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 "I'll probably have enough of it by then," he replied.

"You mean you'll settle here in Damascus?"

"I hadn't thought of it."

"Why not?"

"It's too far west of Dodge," he replied, his face serious, the flame of laughter in his eyes. "There's no chance for a doctor out here."

"There's the biggest chance for men of any calling that ever was," she corrected him, as openly serious as he was mockingly light.

"You're the first one I ever heard say it," he told her, quickened by her originality, although he felt that it was grounded in loyalty for the land of her birth, with little more justification.

"This is a different kind of a country, there isn't any like it in the world," she declared, not with the commercial enthusiasm of a land agent, but with the cool Positiveness of belief. "Men can't come here and do the same old things over that they've been doing somewhere else and make it go. That's why they fail, and get sore and go to knocking. You've got to be original here; it's no place for small people. If a man can do some big and original thinking out here, and go in and put it through, he'll succeed. It calls for preëminence to make a go of it in this country west of Dodge. We're not looking for anything else."

"I'm afraid I can't qualify," he admitted, apparently saddened, or perhaps rebuked, by her glowing recital of requirements.

"I've been around the other places, even England and the European countries—"

"I never have," he confessed, in admiring tribute to