rations. "Shut up, Reif, and
go on with your business!"

Instead, Reifsnyder paused shaving entirely, and turned to front the
speaker. "Let him die?" he demanded. "How vas that? How can you let a
man die?"

"By letting him die, you chump," said the engineer. The others laughed
a little, and Reifsnyder turned at once to his work, sullenly, as a
man overwhelmed by the derision of numbers.

"How vas that?" he grumbled later. "How can you let a man die when he
vas done so much for you?"

"'When he vas done so much for you?'" repeated Bainbridge. "You better
shave some people. How vas that? Maybe this ain't a barber shop?"

A man hitherto silent now said, "If I had been the doctor, I would
have done the same thing."

"Of course," said Reifsnyder. "Any man vould do it. Any man that vas
not like you, you--old--flint-hearted--fish." He had sought the final
words with painful care, and he delivered the collection triumphantly
at Bainbridge. The engineer laughed.

The man in the chair now lifted himself higher, while Reifsnyder began
an elaborate ceremony of anointing and combing his hair. Now free to
join comfortably in the talk, the man said: "They say he is the most
terrible thing in the world. Young Johnnie Bernard--that drives the
grocery wagon--saw him up at Alek Williams's shanty, and he says he
couldn't eat anything for two days."

"Chee!" said Reifsnyder.

"Well, what makes him so terrible?" asked another.

"Because he hasn't got any face," replied the barber and the engineer
in duct.

"Hasn't got any face!" repeated the man. "How can he do without any
face?"

"He has no face in the front of his head.
In the place where his face ought to grow."

Bainbridge sang these lines pathetically as he arose and hung his hat
on a hook. The man in the chair was about to abdicate in his favor.
"Get a gait on you now," he said to Reifsnyder. "I go out at 7.31."

As the barber foamed the lather on the cheeks of the engineer he
seemed to be thinking heavily. Then suddenly he burst out. "How would
you like to be with no face?" he cried to the assemblage.

"Oh, if I had to have a face like yours--" answered one customer.

Bainbridge's voice came from a sea of lather. "You're kicking because
if losing faces became popular, you'd have to go out of business."

"I don't think it will become so much popular," said Reifsnyder.

"Not if it's got to be taken off in the way his was taken off," said
another man. "I'd