s masculine primness to certain hyacinthine
lines which were becoming. Just now his clear brown eyes were luminous
with feeling. He put out a swift, detaining hand and caught hers, laying
sympathetic fingers over the clasp and retaining it as he spoke.

"I'm so relieved that you've come at last," he said. "We need somebody
of intelligence here. I just happened to come past a few minutes after
the accident. Don't be frightened; your uncle came down to see you, and
got a fall somehow. He's hurt pretty badly, I'm afraid, and these people
are refusing to have him taken to the hospital."

On the one side Himes and Buckheath drew back and regarded this scene
with angry derision. In the carriage below Lydia Sessions, who could
hear nothing that was said, stared incredulously, and moved as though to
get down and join Johnnie.

"You'll want him sent to the hospital?" Stoddard urged, half
interrogatively. "Look in there. Listen to the noise. This is no fit
place for a man with a possible fracture of the skull."

"Yes--oh, yes," agreed Johnnie promptly. "If I could nurse him myself
I'd like to--or help; but of course he's got to go to the hospital,
first of everything."

Stoddard motioned the Hardwick driver to wait, and called down to the
carriage load, "I want you people to drive round by the hospital and
send the ambulance, if you'll be so kind. There's a man hurt in here."

Lydia Sessions made this an immediate pretext for getting down and
coming in.

"Did you say they didn't want to send him to the hospital?" she inquired
sharply and openly, in her tactless fashion, as she crossed the
sidewalk. "That's the worst thing about such people; you provide them
with the best, and they don't know enough to appreciate it. Have they
got a doctor, or done anything for the poor man?"

"I sent for Millsaps, here--he knows more about broken bones than
anybody in Cottonville," Pap offered sullenly, mopping his brow and
shaking his bald head. "Millsaps is a decent man. You know what _he's_
a-goin' to do to the sick."

"Is he a doctor?" asked Stoddard sternly, looking the lank, shuffling
individual named.

"He can doctor a cow or a nag better'n anybody ever saw," Pap put
forward rather shamefacedly.

"A veterinarian," commented Stoddard. "Well, they've gone for the
ambulance, and the surgeon will soon be here now."

"I don't know nothin' about veterinarians and surgeons," growled Pap,
still alternately mopping his bald head and