minute I put it on the fire I think of
something I've forgotten, and when I come back it's in flames."

So Jane cut some bread and put on eggs to boil, and the red-haired
person told his story.

"You see," he explained, "although I appear to be a furnace man from
the waist up and an interne from the waist down, I am really the new
superintendent."

"I hope you'll do better than the last one," she said severely. "He
was always flirting with the nurses."

"I shall never flirt with the nurses," he promised, looking at her.
"Anyhow I shan't have any immediate chance. The other fellow left
last night and took with him everything portable except the
ambulance--nurses, staff, cooks. I wish to Heaven he'd taken the
patients! And he did more than that. He cut the telephone wires!"

"Well!" said Jane. "Are you going to stand for it?"

The red-haired man threw up his hands. "The village is with him," he
declared. "It's a factional fight--the village against the
fashionable summer colony on the hill. I cannot telephone from the
village--the telegraph operator is deaf when I speak to him; the
village milkman and grocer sent boys up this morning--look here."
He fished a scrap of paper from his pocket and read:

I will not supply the Valley Hospital with any fresh
meats, canned oysters and sausages, or do any plumbing
for the hospital until the reinstatement of Dr. Sheets.
T. CASHDOLLAR, Butcher.

Jane took the paper and read it again. "Humph!" she commented.
"Old Sheets wrote it himself. Mr. Cashdollar couldn't think
'reinstatement,' let alone spell it."

"The question is not who wrote it, but what we are to do," said the
red-haired person. "Shall I let old Sheets come back?"

"If you do," said Jane fiercely, "I shall hate you the rest of my
life."

And as it was clear by this time that the red-haired person could
imagine nothing more horrible, it was settled then and there that he
should stay.

"There are only two wards," he said. "In the men's a man named
Higgins is able to be up and is keeping things straight. And in the
woman's ward Mary O'Shaughnessy is looking after them. The furnaces
are the worst. I'd have forgiven almost anything else. I've sat up
all night nursing the fires, but they breathed their last at six
this morning and I guess there's nothing left but to call the
coroner."

Jane had achieved a tolerable plate of toast by that time and four
eggs. A