e frightened. Then he crept toward the scullery door and
waited there.

It swung open slowly, but he waited until it closed again and the man
was in the room. Then he yelled and jumped and there was the sound of
a fall. I could hardly strike the match--I was trembling so--but when I
did there was Mr. Dick lying flat on the floor and the doctor sitting on
him.

"Mister Dick!" I gasped, and dropped the match.

"Something hit me!" Mr. Dick said feebly, and when I had got a candle
lighted and had explained to Doctor Barnes that it was a mistake, he
got off him and let him up. He was as bewildered as Mr. Dick and pretty
nearly as mad.

We put him--Mr. Dick--in a chair and gave him a glass of water, and
after he had got his breath--the doctor being a heavy man--he said he
was trying to find something to eat.

"Confound it, Minnie," he exclaimed, "we're starving! It seems to me
there are enough of you here at least to see that we are fed. Not a bite
since lunch!"

"But I thought you had the basket," I explained. "I left it at the
spring-house, and when I went back it was gone."

"So that was it!" he answered. And then he explained that just about the
time they expected their supper they saw a man carry a basket stealthily
through the snow to the deer park. It was twilight, but they watched him
from the window, and he put the basket through the barbed-wire fence and
then crawled after it. Just inside he sat down on a log and, opening
the basket, began to eat. He was still there when it got too dark to see
him.

"If that was our dinner," he finished savagely, "I hope he choked to
death over it."

Doctor Barnes chuckled. "He didn't," he said, "but he's got the worst
case of indigestion in seven counties."

Well, I got the mustard and water ready with Mr. Dick standing by hoping
Mr. Biggs would die before he got it, and then I filled a basket for the
shelter-house. I put out the light and he took the basket and started
out, but he came back in a hurry.

"There's somebody outside talking," he said. I went to the door with him
and listened.

"The sooner the better," Mike was saying. "I'm no good while I've got it
on my mind."

And Mr. Thoburn: "To-morrow is too soon: they're not in the mood yet.
Perhaps the day after. I'll let you know."

I didn't get to sleep until almost morning, and then it was to dream
that Mr. Pierce was shouting "Hypocrites" to all the people in the
sanatorium and threatening to throw glass