"Well, of all the - "

"I'm going over to get something for this abominable headache
- and, incidentally, to find out what's the row. He's
probably lost a patient - it always goes to his brain like
that. When he abuses his beloved engine that way it's because
some other machinery has stopped somewhere."

"If he's lost a patient you'd better let him alone, dear,"
advised his wife, Winifred.

"No - he needs to get his mind off it, on me. I can fix up a
few symptoms for him."

"He'll see through you," called Mrs. Chester softly, after
him.

"No doubt of that. But it may divert him, just the same."

Chester made his way across the lawn and in at the side door
which led to the dimly lighted village offices of Redfield
Pepper Burns, physician and surgeon. Not that the
gilt-lettered sign on the glass of the office door read that
way. "R. F. Burns, M.D." was the brief inscription above the
table of "office hours," and the owner of the name invariably
so curtailed it. But among his friends the full name had
inevitably been turned into the nickname, for the big,
red-haired, quick-tempered, warm-hearted fellow was "Red
Pepper Burns" as irresistibly to them as he had been, a decade