h day of the expedition, with
Judge Priest at rest at the close of a satisfactory day's sports,
exhaling scents of the oil of penny-royal. Sitting-there under a tent
fly, all sun blistered and skeeter stung, all tired out but most
content, he picks up a two-day-old copy of the _Daily Evening News_
which the darky boatman has just brought over to camp from the post
office at Walnut Log, and he opens it at the department headed Local
Laconics, and halfway down the first column his eye falls upon a
paragraph at sight of which he gives so deep a snort that Doctor Lake
swings about from where he is shaving before a hand mirror hung on a
tree limb and wants to know whether the judge has happened upon
disagreeable tidings. What the judge has read is a small item in this
wise, namely:

Born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, at their palatial
mansion on Chickasaw Drive, in the new Beechmont Park Realty
Development tract, an infant daughter, their first-born. Mother and
child both doing well; the proud papa reported this morning as
being practically out of danger and is expected to be entirely
recovered shortly, as Dock Boyd, the attending medico, says he has
brought three hundred babies into the world and never lost a father
yet. Ye editor extends heartiest congrats. Dal, it looks like the
cigars were on you!

The next chapter in the sequence of chapters leading to our climax is
short but essential. Returning home Sunday evening, Judge Priest is
informed that twice that day a strange young white lady has stopped at
the house urgently requesting that immediately upon his arrival he be so
good as to call on Mrs. Dallam Wybrant on a matter of pressing moment.
Bidden to describe the messenger, Jeff Poindexter can only say that she
'uz a powerful masterful-lookin' Yankee-talkin' lady, all dressed up lak
she mout belong to some kind of a new secret s'ciety lodge, which is
Jeff's way of summing up his impressions of the first professional
trained nurse ever imported, capped, caped and white shod, to our town.

It was this same professional, a cool and starchy vision, who led the
way up the wide stairs of the Chickasaw Drive house, the old judge, much
mystified, following close behind her. She ushered him into a bedroom,
bigger and more gorgeous than any bedroom he had ever seen, and leaving
him standing, hat in hand, at the bedside of her chief charge, she went
out and clos