fight fur to
hold onto the little mist of life she thinks now is still into it. She
unbuttons her dress and lays the kid against the heat of her own breast.
And wills fur it to live, and fights fur it to, and determines that it
must, and jest natcherally tries fur to bullyrag death into going away.
And Colonel Tom watching, and wishing that it wouldn't. But he gets
interested in that there fight, and so purty soon he is hoping both ways
by spells. And the fight all going on without a word spoken.

But finally the nurse begins fur to cry. Not because she is sure it is
dead. But because she is sure it is coming back. Which it does, slow.

"'But I have told HER that it is dead,'" says Colonel Tom, jerking his
head toward the other room where Miss Lucy is lying. He speaks in a low
voice and closes the door when he speaks. Fur it looks now like it was
getting strong enough so it might even squall a little.

"I don't know what kind of a look there was on my face," says Colonel
Tom, telling of the story to his sister and the doctor, "but she must
have seen that I was--and heaven help me, but I WAS!--sorry that the
baby was alive. It would have been such an easy way out of it had it
been really dead!

"'She mustn't know that it is living,' I said to the nurse, finally,"
says Colonel Tom, going on with his story. I had been watching Miss
Lucy's face as Colonel Tom talked and she was so worked up by that fight
fur the kid's life she was breathless. But her eyes was cast down, I
guess so her brother couldn't see them. Colonel Tom goes on with his
story:

"'You don't mean--' said the nurse, startled.

"'No! No!' I said, 'of course--not that! But--why should she ever know
that it didn't die?'"

"'It is illegitimate?' asked the nurse.

"'Yes,' I said." The long and short of it was, Colonel Tom went on to
tell, that the nurse went out and got her mother. Which the two of them
lived alone, only around the corner. And give the child into the keeping
of her mother, who took it away then and there.

Colonel Tom had made up his mind there wasn't going to be no bastards in
the Buckner fambly. And now that Miss Lucy thought it was dead he would
let her keep on thinking so. And that would be settled for good and all.
He figgered that it wouldn't ever hurt her none if she never knowed it.

The nurse's mother kept it all that week, and it throve. Colonel Tom was
coaxing of his sister to go back to Tennessee. But she wouldn't go. So