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 be 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.”