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all ready for me.”
    Maude squashed out her cigarette. “Maybe you don’t work us to death, Alex Whiting,” she said, “but you sure worry us enough.”
    “He’s changing, isn’t he, Maude?” Joan said after Alex had left the office.
    “Mmm, I don’t know. He’s a lot like his father.” Maude could remember the day he was born. It was in 1919, days similar to the present: peace conferences without the certainty of peace, Balkan troubles, reparations. It was not the sort of news the Sentinel carried, but things Alex’s father felt called for comment and thought in every community, even Hillside. He had had his say, and for a time the Sentinel had been delivered free and without advertising. He couldn’t afford it then, and the only bright spot in those days was the birth of Alex. The Whitings had lost two children before that, and they had all but given up hope of having one. “I’d say he was having growing pains. It’s not easy to be Charlie Whiting’s son. When he does something good, people say he’s a chip off the old block. When he makes a mistake, they say he’ll never be the man his father was. He’s finding his own way now. I know all his symptoms. He’ll break out in a crusade one of these days, just like his father used to.” Maude sighed. “I don’t know if I’m up to them any more. It’s all very well to go out swinging for some cause or other. But when you’re sitting back here trying to balance the books, the flavor’s more like ashes.” She looked up at Joan. “I suppose you think he’s wonderful?”
    “No. Very nice, but not wonderful.”
    Joan was not a pretty girl, but there was a quiet depth about her. It was in her eyes, her slow smile. Only when you talked with her for a long time did you discover the scope of her awareness and imagination. Or you could see it in the hundred different ways she found to spice the drab news of Hillside.
    “In some ways he’s a danged fool,” Maude said, taking her hat from the letter basket.
    Joan’s color heightened, and at that moment, Maude thought, she was the most beautiful girl in town.

Chapter 5
    A LEX STOPPED AT THE station on his way home. Mayor Altman was sitting beside the chief’s desk when he walked in. His legs were spread apart, the better to support his ample stomach. One of the things Alex didn’t like about him was the way he parted his hair in the middle so that it looked like a toupee, which, he thought to himself, was a fine basis for prejudice.
    “Hello, Mr. Altman,” he said. “Still hot, isn’t it?”
    “Terrible. I’d like to scratch August off the calendar. How’s your father these days, Alex?”
    “Fine, thanks.”
    “Still taking it easy? It must be wonderful.”
    “Not to hear him tell it!”
    “A wonderful man, Alex. Wonderful man.”
    Yes, he thought. Altman would say that as long as Charlie Whiting wasn’t tearing into one of his pet schemes. For years the mayor had been trying to lure one industry after another to Hillside. At one time he had induced the town board to buy a two-acre plot on which he intended a tractor outfit to build a factory: The tractor company decided in favor of the county seat at Riverdale, and the town treasurer had to unload the property. Altman was not happy with Mr. Whiting’s Sentinel comments on the town as a real estate brokerage.
    “Find anything up there, Alex?” Waterman asked.
    “Not much. A hundred eighty-three dollars, two books on hydraulics and one by Tom Paine. Also an old army campaign ribbon.” He laid the money on the chief’s desk, and a page from his notebook, listing the items.
    “I wouldn’t go any further on this, Waterman, if I were you,” the mayor said.
    Alex looked at him.
    “I only mean that there’s no use antagonizing the county. After all they have the equipment. What I mean is, they’re more qualified than … Well, Hillside isn’t exactly prepared to investigate a thing like this.”
    “I think we might muddle through