n of the men--one after the
other--to go skeeing with me this morning and not one of them accepted!"

"Really!" Mr. Sam exclaimed mockingly.

"What can you do with people like that?" Mr. Pierce went on. "They don't
want to be well; they're all hypocrites. Look at that man Biggs! I'll
lay you ten to one that after fasting five days and then stealing a
whole chicken, a dozen oysters and Lord knows what else, now that he's
sick, he'll hold it against me."

"He's not holding anything," I objected.

"Because HE is a hypocrite--" Mr. Sam began.

"That's not the point, Pierce," Mr. Dick broke in importantly. "You were
to come here for orders and you haven't done it. You're running this
place for me, not for yourself."

Mr. Pierce looked at Mr. Dick and from there to Mr. Sam and smiled.

"I did come," he explained. "I came twice, and each time we played
roulette. I lost all the money I'd had in advance. Honestly," he
confessed, "I felt I couldn't afford to come every day."

Miss Patty got up and put the baby rabbits into her sister's big fur
muff.

"We are all talking around the question," she said. "Mr. Pierce
undertook to manage the sanatorium, and to try to manage it
successfully. He can not do that without making some attempt at
conciliating the people. It's--it's absurd to antagonize them."

"Exactly," he said coldly. "I was to manage it, and to try to do it
successfully. I'm sorry my methods don't meet with the approval of
this--er--executive committee. But it might as well be clear that I
intend to use my own methods--or none."

Well, what could we do? Miss Patty went out with her head up, and the
rest of us stayed and ate humble pie, and after a while he agreed to
stay if he wasn't interfered with. He said he and Doctor Barnes had a
plan that he thought was a winner--that it would either make or break
the place, and he thought it would make it. And by that time we were so
meek that we didn't even ask what it was.

Doctor Barnes and Miss Summers were the first to come to the mineral
spring that morning. She stopped just inside the door and sniffed.

"Something's dead under the floor," she said.

"If there's anything dead," Doctor Barnes replied, "it's in the center
of the earth. That's the sulphur water."

She came in at that, but unwillingly, and sat down with her handkerchief
to her nose. Then she saw me.

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "What have you done that they put you
here?"

"If you mean t