ious I am to do good work the surer I am to do
it. I don't know why it should be so; I've heard plenty of men say it
worked just the other way with them. Yes, I do know why. I think I'll
tell you the explanation. The more anxious I am the harder I pray to my
God to make me fit. And when I go from my knees to the operating-room I
feel armed to the teeth."

He smiled, a brilliant, heart-warming smile, and suddenly he looked, to
the man on the bed who gazed at him, more like a conqueror than any one
he had ever seen. And all at once James Van Horn understood why, with
all his faults of temper and speech, his patients loved and clung to Red
Pepper Burns; and why he, Van Horn himself, had not been able to defeat
Burns as a rival. There was something about the man which spoke of
power, and at this moment it seemed clear, even to the skeptic, that it
was not wholly human power.

Burns bent over the bed. "Good-night, Doctor," he said softly, almost as
he might have spoken to a child. Then, quite as he might have spoken to
a child, he added: "Say a bit of a prayer before you go to sleep. It
won't hurt you, and--who knows?--even unbelieving, you may get an
answer."

Van Horn smiled up at him wanly. "Good-night, Doctor," he replied.
"Thank you for coming in--whether I sleep the better or the worse for
it."

* * * * *

If there were anything of the fanatic about Redfield Pepper Burns--and
the term was one which no human being but Van Horn had ever applied to
him--it was the fighting, not the fasting, side of his character which
showed uppermost at ten next morning. He came out of his hospital
dressing-room with that look of dogged determination written upon brow
and mouth which his associates knew well, and they had never seen it
written larger. From Doctor Buller, who usually gave the anesthetics in
Burns's cases, and from Miss Mathewson, who almost invariably worked
upon the opposite side of the operating table, to the newest nurse whose
only mission was to be at hand for observation, the staff more or less
acutely sensed the situation. Not one of those who had been for any
length of time in the service but understood that it was an unusual
situation.

That James Van Horn and R.P. Burns had long been conscious or
unconscious rivals was known to everybody. Van Horn was not popular with
the hospital staff, while Burns might have ordered them all to almost
any deed of valour and have been loyal