he thought, than to risk a damage suit by a millionaire.

"I'll come at once," Oliver said. "I owe you that, I think, after the fright Champ gave you."

And, belatedly, the realization that he might handle a bear—a great, live, lumbering bear!—surged up inside him to titillate his old boyhood yearning. Perhaps it was as well that his aunt and sister were away; this chance to exercise his natural skill at dealing with animals was too precious to decline.

"Of course I won't guarantee a cure," Oliver said, qualifying his promise, "because I've never diagnosed such a case. But I think I can help your bear."

Oddly enough, he was almost sure that he could. Oliver, in his younger days, had read a great deal on the care and treatment of circus animals, and the symptoms in this instance had a familiar sound. Mr. Furnay's bear, he thought, in all probability had worms.

The Furnay town car purred away, leaving Oliver to marvel at his own daring while he collected the instruments and medicines he might need.

In leaving the clinic he noted that Mr. Furnay's chauffeur had dropped his handkerchief at the doorway in his hurry to be gone—but Oliver by this time was in too great a hurry to stop and retrieve it.

His Aunt Katisha might spoil the whole adventure on the instant with a telephone call from Tampa. Bivins could wait.

he drive, after a day spent in the antiseptic confines of his clinic, was like a holiday jaunt.

The late June sun was hot and bright, the rows of suburban houses trim and clean as scrubbed children sunning themselves among color-splashed crotons and hibiscus and flaming poincianas. Oliver whistled gaily as he turned his little white-paneled call truck off the highway and drove between twin ranks of shedding cabbage palms toward the iron gates of the Furnay estate.

A uniformed gateman who might have been a twin to Bivins admitted him, pointing out a rambling white building that lay behind the stuccoed mansion, and shut the gate. Oliver parked his truck before the menagerie building—it had been a stable in the heyday of the Prohibition-era gangster, when it had held horses or cases of contraband as occasion demanded—and found Bivins waiting for him.

Bivins, looking upset and sullen in immaculate new whipcords, opened the 

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