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 "I'd feel like a cad if I had to owe it to any other girl. If it wasn't you, Elizabeth, Burnett's right about it."

"I expect he is," she agreed.

"I asked him who it was, but he wouldn't tell me. He said the person who did it wasn't out looking for thanks."

"Let it go at that, then."

"I suppose I'll have to. But I'll feel like a sneak, going around in debt to somebody for my life who figures it's something that might hurt his reputation if it got out on him. That shows how I'm rated in this man's town, and yet there are people who tell me I ought to hang out my shingle here and settle down."

"That don't signify," she said, in her breezy, sure-footed way, her poise entirely recovered. "It's somebody that don't want to get in bad with that bunch of shooters over in Simrall. Pass it up."

"The trouble of it is I'll have to treat everybody in this town with a deference they don't deserve and I don't feel, on the chance of snubbing the real hero of the occasion."

"You'd make by it, maybe, if you would come down off your high horse now and then, call them by their first names and set up the cigars. A doctor's got to be more or less a politician, dad says, and I think he's right."

"Oh, if I wanted to stay here in Damascus and build up a practice I could do even that, I guess, but it's a kind of cheap way of getting where you want to go."

"Don't you want to stay in Damascus?" she asked, glancing at him archly, her words almost coaxing.

"Do you want me to stay?" he returned, boorishly, as he realized next moment.

Elizabeth nodded, not a shade of pink in her face.

"Uh-huh!" she grunted, like a tobacco chewer looking