I said. "He hasn't been natural all evening. What's the matter with
him? Too much fast?"

"Fast!" He laughed. "Too much feast! He's got as pretty a case of
indigestion as I've seen for some time. He's giving a demonstration
that's almost theatrical."

Well, he insisted it was indigestion, although I argued that it wasn't
possible, and he wanted ipecac.

"I haven't seen a pharmacopoeia for so long that I wouldn't know one if
I met it," he declared, "but I've got a system of mnemonics that never
fails. Ipecac and colic both end with 'c'--I'll never forget that
conjunction. It was pounded in and poured in in my early youth."

Well, the pharmacy was locked, and we couldn't find a key to fit it. And
when I suggested mustard and warm water he jumped at the idea.

"Fine!" he said. "Better let me dish out the spring-water and you take
my job! Lead on, MacDuff, to the kitchen."

Although it was only midnight there was not a soul about. A hall leads
back of the office to the kitchen and pantries, and there was a low
light there, but the rest was dark. We bumped through the diet kitchen
and into the scullery, when we found we had no matches. I went back for
some, and when I got as far as the diet kitchen again Doctor Barnes was
there, just inside the door.

"Sh!" he whispered. "Come into the scullery. The kitchen is dark, but
there is somebody in there, fumbling around, striking matches. I suppose
you don't have such things as burglars in this neck of the woods?"

Well, somebody had broken into Timmons' candy store a week before and
stolen a box of chewing-gum and a hundred post-cards, and I told him so
in a whisper.

"Anyhow, it isn't the chef," I said. "He's had a row with the bath man
and is in bed with a cut hand and a black eye, and nobody else has any
business here."

We tiptoed into the scullery in the dark: just then somebody knocked
a kettle down in the kitchen and it hit the stove below with a crash.
Whoever was there swore, and it was not Francois, who expresses his
feelings mostly in French. This was English.

There's a little window from the kitchen into the scullery as well as
a door. The window had a wooden slide and it was open an inch or so. We
couldn't see anything, but we could hear a man moving around. Once he
struck a match, but it went out and he said "Damn!" again, and began to
feel his way toward the scullery.

Doctor Barnes happened to touch my hand and he patted it as if to tell
me not to b