“Very well, Doctor.”  The colonel was curt and his tone admitted nothing of his sentiments.

“DO you care to listen to it?  It rather vitally concerns the Consolidated Water Company.”

“You don’t blame us for all these typhoid cases, do you?”

“No, sir—­not for all of them.”

“Why blame us for any of them?  Our analyses show that we’re giving clean water.  How about dirty milkmen and the sanitary arrangements in these tenement-houses and all such?  It’s the fashion to blame a corporation for everything bad that happens in this world.”

“We have placed blame on milkmen where any blame is due,” stated Dr. Dohl.  He tapped his manuscript.  “But I have spent considerable of my department’s money in making a house-to-house canvass, tracing the sources.  The man before me guessed.  I have made sure!  Colonel Dodd, the Consolidated water is pretty poisonous stuff these days.”

“What’s the matter in this state all of a sudden?” snapped the colonel.  “I am told that a lunatic almost broke up our city government meeting the other night, shouting that the Consolidated is trying to poison folks.  You’re too level-headed a man to get into that class, Dr. Dohl.”

“I’ll allow you to set me down in any class which seems fitting from your point of view,” replied the doctor, stiffly.  “But if that lunatic, as you call him, got an angle-worm or a frog’s leg out of his tap I don’t blame him for breaking up a meeting of the city government which will tolerate the water which is being pumped through the city mains just now.”

“We’re working on the filtering-plant—­it will be all right in a little while.  It got out of hand before we realized it,” said the colonel, now a bit apologetic.

“In this crisis your filter amounts to about that!” The doctor snapped a pudgy finger into a plump palm.  “The river-water in this state has been poisoned.  You must go into the hills—­to the lakes, Colonel Dodd.”

“You don’t mean to say that you recommend that in your report, Doctor?”

“Absolutely—­emphatically.”

“Without stopping to think of the millions it will cost my company to build over its plants?”

“It has come to a point where it isn’t a question of money, Colonel.”

“We can’t afford it.”

“Then let the cities and towns of the state buy in their water-plants and do it.”

“Good Jefferson!  Don’t you know that every city and town in this state where we have a water-plant has already exceeded its debt limit of five percent?”

“Do I understand you as intimating, Colonel Dodd, that there is no help for this present condition of affairs?”

“Look here—­I’m neither a Herod nor a Moloch, even if some of the crack-brained agitators in this state will have it that way,” protested the magnate, with heat.  “Are you going to print that report before you have given us time to turn around?”