We parted on this jest.  Miss Caroline, I believe, went to be scolded by Clem for her trifling ways, while I sought out Solon Denney.

When something must be done, I seem never to know what it shall be.  I believe Solon is often quite as uncertain, but he will never confess this, so that talk with him under such circumstances stimulates if it does not sustain.

I put Miss Caroline’s difficulties before him.  As any common catalogue of troubles will not provoke Solon from a happy unconcern which is temperamental, I spared no details in my recital, and I observed at length that my listener was truly aroused to the bad way in which Miss Caroline found herself.  He sat forward in his chair, rested one elbow upon his untidy desk, and for several moments of silence jabbed an inky pen rhythmically into the largest rutabaga ever grown in Slocum County.  At last he sat back and gazed upon me distantly from inspired eyes.  Then, with his characteristic enthusiasm, he exclaimed:—­

“Something will have to be done!”

“Wonderful!” I murmured.  “Here I’ve worried over the thing for two months, studied it in court, studied it in my office, studied it in bed—­and couldn’t make a thing out of it.  All at once I am guided to a welling fount of wisdom, and the thing is solved in a flash.  Solon, you dazzle me!  Denney forever!”

“Now, don’t be funny, Calvin—­I mean, don’t try to be—­” but I arose to go.

“You’ve solved it, Solon. Something must be done. There’s the difference between intuition and mere clumsy ratiocination.  In another month I might have found this out for myself, but you divine it instantly.  You’re a clairvoyant.  Now I’m going to find Billy Durgin.  You’ve done the heavy work—­you’ve discovered that something must be done.  What we need now, I suppose, is a bright young detective to tell us what it is.”

But Solon interrupted soothingly.  “There, there, something must be done, and, of course, I’ll do it.”

“What will you do?”

Even then I think he did not know.

“We must use common sense in these matters,” he said, to gain time, and narrowed his gaze for an interval of study.  At last he drove the pen viciously to its hilt in the rutabaga, and almost shouted:—­

“I’ll go to see Mrs. Potts!”

Before I could again express my enthusiasm, reawakened by the felicitous adequacy of this device, he had seized his hat and was clattering noisily down the stairway.

Two hours later Solon bustled into my own office, whither I had fled to forget his manifest incompetence.  His hat was well back, and he seemed to be inflated with secrecy.  I remembered it was thus he had impressed me just previous to the coup that had relieved us of Potts.  I knew at once that he was going to be mysterious with me.

“I am not to say a word to any one,” I began, merely to show him that I was not dense.