ht take some of the
pressure off somewhere else," growled R. P. Burns. He shut the door of
the inner office hard behind him.

"I thought so," declared Arthur Chester, suddenly forgetting about his
headache in his anxiety to know the explanation of the five cylinders.
It was a small suburban town in which they lived, and if something had
gone wrong it was a matter of common interest. "Can you tell me about
it?" he asked--a little diffidently, for none knew better than he that
things could not always be told, and that no lips were locked tighter
than Red Pepper's when the secret was not his to tell.

"Engine's on the blink. Got to go out and fix it," was the unpromising
reply. Burns picked up a sparkplug from the office desk as he spoke.

"Had your dinner?"

"Don't want it."

"Shall I go out with you?"

The answer was an unintelligible grunt. As Chester was about to follow
his friend out--for there could be no doubt that Red Pepper Burns was
his friend in spite of this somewhat surly, though by no means unusual,
treatment--another door opened tentatively, and a head was cautiously
inserted.

"Your dinner's ready, Doctor Burns," said a doubtful voice.

Burns turned. "Leave a pitcher of milk on the table for me, Cynthia,"
he said in a gentler voice than Chester had yet heard from him tonight,
crisp though it was. "Nothing else."

Chester, catching a glimpse of a brightly lighted dining-room and
a table lavishly spread, undertook to remonstrate. He had seen the
housekeeper's disappointed face, also. But Burns cut him short.

"Come along--if you must," said he, and stalked out into the night.

For an hour, in the light from one of the Green Imp's lamps, Chester sat
on an overturned box and watched Burns work. He worked savagely, as if
applying surgical measures to a mood as well as to a machine. He worked
like a skilled mechanic as well; every turn of a nut, every polish of
a thread meaning definite means to an end. The night was hot and he had
thrown off coat and collar and rolled his sleeves high, so a brawny arm
gleamed in the bright lamplight, and the open shirt exposed a powerful
neck. Chester, who was of slighter build and not as tall as he would
have liked to be, watched enviously.

"Whatever goes wrong with your affairs, Red," he observed suddenly,
breaking a long interval during which the engine had been made to throb
and whirl like the "ten thousand furies" to whom its engineer had lately
made allusio