Midsummer faded into late summer, and Dave Cowan was still small-towning it.

To the uninformed he might have seemed a staff, fixed and permanent, to Sam Pickering and the Newbern Center _Advance_.

But Sam was not uninformed.

He was wise in Dave's ways; he knew the longer Dave stayed the more casually would he flit; an hour's warning and the _Advance_ would be needing a printer.

So Sam became aware on a day in early September that he would be wise to have a substitute ready.