nd they found that if they wanted not only to live at peace, but to
exist at all, they had to accept the situation on his own terms. More
than once the store of a trader obnoxious to him had been burned down,
and there was only the appositeness of the event to show that the
administrator had instigated it. Once a Swedish half-caste, ruined by
the burning, had gone to him and roundly accused him of arson. Walker
laughed in his face.

"You dirty dog. Your mother was a native and you try to cheat the
natives. If your rotten old store is burned down it's a judgment of
Providence; that's what it is, a judgment of Providence. Get out."

And as the man was hustled out by two native policemen the administrator
laughed fatly.

"A judgment of Providence."

And now Mackintosh watched him enter upon the day's work. He began with
the sick, for Walker added doctoring to his other activities, and he had
a small room behind the office full of drugs. An elderly man came
forward, a man with a crop of curly grey hair, in a blue _lava-lava_,
elaborately tatooed, with the skin of his body wrinkled like a
wine-skin.

"What have you come for?" Walker asked him abruptly.

In a whining voice the man said that he could not eat without vomiting
and that he had pains here and pains there.

"Go to the missionaries," said Walker. "You know that I only cure
children."

"I have been to the missionaries and they do me no good."

"Then go home and prepare yourself to die. Have you lived so long and
still want to go on living? You're a fool."

The man broke into querulous expostulation, but Walker, pointing to a
woman with a sick child in her arms, told her to bring it to his desk.
He asked her questions and looked at the child.

"I will give you medicine," he said. He turned to the half-caste clerk.
"Go into the dispensary and bring me some calomel pills."

He made the child swallow one there and then and gave another to the
mother.

"Take the child away and keep it warm. To-morrow it will be dead or
better."

He leaned back in his chair and lit his pipe.

"Wonderful stuff, calomel. I've saved more lives with it than all the
hospital doctors at Apia put together."

Walker was very proud of his skill, and with the dogmatism of ignorance
had no patience with the members of the medical profession.

"The sort of case I like," he said, "is the one that all the doctors
have given up as hopeless. When the doctors have said they can't cure