its secretions. However, it's beginning to go against my
ideas to discover that there's more salt than belief within me when I
get up to recite my Credo."

The doctor laughed, in comfortable comprehension.

"It depends a little on how your salt analyzes out, Brenton. It may be
much more harmless than you think, just a normal precipitate and not a
deadly poison. However," and the doctor's face twinkled with humorous
sympathy; "it's just about as well to keep it in solution for the
present. Therefore, both as your medical adviser and as your senior
warden, I'm going to give you a tonic to that end. Moreover, I want you
to eat lots of underdone beef, to drink lots of good beer, and spend a
good half your time out-doors. Then, if the doubts hang on, come back
to me and I'll take another whack at them. They're harmless enough now,
like most germs in their early stages of development; but nobody knows
what they may turn into, if we let them go on working. Now come along
into the laboratory and watch my latest bacillus increase and multiply.
It beats the sons of Adam into a cocked hat; and it has more horns than
all of your damned doubtings put together." On the threshold of the
laboratory, however, the old doctor paused. His accent, when he spoke,
was absolutely reverent, despite his words. "Brenton, you all of you
admit, whether you believe in eternal law or in special creation, that
God made man in His own image. Then, granted a proper ancestry for
every germ, there must have been some place for doubtings, even in the
original and immortal Pattern. If that's the case, why should we all of
us set ourselves up to confound them utterly? They must have some
worthy purpose; else they never would have survived."

Side by side, the two men hung over the bacillus and forgot the
doubtings. Later, when Brenton went away, he took with him the
prescription for the tonic and gave the doctor his solemn word of
honour that he would straightway telephone for beef and beer. He kept
his word so well, and so clever had been the doctor's diagnosis that
Reed Opdyke, flat on his back through all the torrid heat of summer,
felt moved to express his envious approbation.

"Hang it all, Brenton, what are you doing to yourself, these latter
days?" he demanded, one morning after the four walls of his prison room
had seemed closing in upon him and smothering him, during all the
sultry night. "You look as fit as a fighting cock, when all the rest of