Harvard. He wrote asking whether he knew of a public health appointment. Sondelius answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl, that he remembered with joy their Minneapolis vacation, that he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard about the nature of metathrombin, that there was an excellent Italian restaurant in Boston, and that he would inquire among his health-official friends as to a position.
Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Director of Public Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking for a second-in-command, and would probably be willing to send particulars.
Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.
"Gosh! Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus! Against three hundred and sixty-six here—no, wait, it's three hundred and sixty-seven now, with that new baby of Pete Yeska's that the dirty swine called in Hesselink for. People! People that can talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora, we'll be like a pair of kids let loose from school!"
He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the station agent, who was also telegraph operator.
The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that Dr. Pickerbaugh required an assistant who would be the only full-time medical officer besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the clinic and school doctors were private physicians working part-time. The assistant would be epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and manager of the office clerks, the nurses, and the lay inspectors of dairies and sanitation. The salary would be twenty-five hundred dollars a year—against the fifteen or sixteen hundred Martin was making in Wheatsylvania.
Proper recommendations were desired.
Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb, now at the McGurk Institute in New York.
Dr. Pickerbaugh informed him, "I have received very pleasant letters from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you, but the letter from Dr. Gottlieb is quite remarkable. He says you have rare gifts as a laboratory man. I take great pleasure in offering you the appointment kindly wire."
Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leaving Wheatsylvania—the tedium of Bert Tozer's nagging—the spying of Pete Yeska and the Norbloms—the inevitability of turning, as so many unchanging times he had turned, south from the Leopolis road at the Two Mile Grove and following
