Groff made thrifty inventory of what was on and behind the serving counter. A coffeemaker--no good. No power, though a cup of good hot coffee would have helped a lot. Easily a dozen cardboard boxes which, opened, proved to contain peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers and Orioles. Candy bars and bags of peanuts beyond their utmost powers of consumption--they might get rickets, but they wouldn't starve. But water, though--the place didn't seem to have any. Scratch water. They could get by on the soft drinks, or if worse came to worst, there certainly was much more water than they needed right outside. A telephone! He looked through all his pockets without coming up with anything smaller than a quarter; he slipped the quarter into the slot and there was a mellow bong to acknowledge it. There was nothing else. He held the receiver to his ears for a good two minutes, but the line was dead. And then he found the greatest treasure of all, a box of stubby short candles, under the serving counter. Evidently power failures were not unheard of around here--something, Groff reminded himself automatically, to keep in mind when he talked to the burgess tomorrow. _If_ he talked to the burgess tomorrow. There was something there that would need thinking about, too, but the thing to do right now was locate some matches. His own, of course, were more than merely wet--the striking surface had soaked right off them. But there was a cigarette machine, and fortunately a mechanical, not an electrically operated, one. By the time Sam got back with the others Groff was busy by candlelight, trying to brace a Coca-Cola easel display to cover the window they had broken. Sharon Froman was hugging the briefcase full of manuscript. * * * * * You don't last thirty years in the resort business unless you know how to take your mind off your troubles. Mrs. Goudeket, sipping delicately from a quart bottle of black cherry soda, chattered gaily: "Soda pop! Three years I haven't had a drop of soda pop. Now don't tell on me, Dick. If Dr. Postal ever finds out, he'll kill me next time he comes to the hotel--" She choked on a swallow of the soda. Dick McCue sat on one of the counter stools, sneering at the spectacle Sharon Froman was making of herself over that Mickey Groff. All the same, he admitted to himself, it was a real championship performance. She hadn't had two minutes alone with him, but McCue was willing to bet she could tell to a nickel how much a transistor manufacturer, in process of expansion from forty employees to a hundred, was likely to have in the bank. And there wasn't a chance in the world that this Groff knew what she was doing. This was the no-nonsense Sharon, the hard-working first-week-of-the-season Sharon, who was right by Groff's side when he needed a hand, who didn't ask foolish questions, who kept calm and ready. And to think that as late as Monday night, sneaking back to his own room, he had begun to think--