The vein that had been tapped--it was assuredly no artery nor even one of the very largest veins--had bled in crass profusion for a space. Then the caking of the blood had checked further flow. Dad was surgeon enough to realize that that meant there could be little if any more flow of blood from so petty a wound. He was looking from side to side in search of something better than a uniform jacket wherewith to bind the hurt, when again the little lady stood before him. Tucked under one arm was a black case, under the other were rolls of white bandages. In both hands she bore a basin of hot water in which a soft sponge bobbed like a floating island. “There!” she said soothingly. “Just you lean back and rest. I’ll ’tend to the wound.” With deft fingers she bathed the arm, then sponged the bullet-graze clean of blood. From the black case she drew a bottle filled with some pungent liquid. With this liquid she washed out the wound, then proceeded to bind it skillfully with a roll of the bandages. So slight was the hurt that, but for the accident of its touching the wrong vein, it might well have caused so healthy a man no more annoyance than would the process of vaccination. Yet for once in his life Dad felt no inclination to belittle a physical mishap. He discovered--and wondered vaguely at the discovery--that it was marvelously pleasant to lie back like this and let his strange little hostess minister to his hurt. Her touch, too, held for him a strange and soothing magnetism all its own. Not for twenty years had a gentlewoman laid her hand upon him. The novelty of it was delightful. Yet in his heart Dad felt the novelty was by no means all. As she worked, the little lady’s tongue went as nimbly as her fingers. “Isn’t this what Ehud used to call rank good luck?” she was saying. “This afternoon of all afternoons, too. Why, three days out of four I’m as busy as tunket all afternoon. And here, just to-day, I said to myself: ‘I guess I’ll sit on the stoop a spell and play lady, and do some knitting.’ And I hadn’t been there three minutes, hardly, when past you came prancing. “There’s another piece of luck, too. Only this noon I let all three of the house servants run over to the Winstons’ plantation to a wedding in the servants’ quarters over there. And I sent Tom--he’s my gardener, the only man slave I’ve got left here--over to see they didn’t stay too late. Any other day they’d be screeching like a pack of wildcats at sight of a Yankee.” “But, madam,” expostulated Dad, finding his voice at last, “surely you run a risk, harboring a fugitive Union soldier. It was selfish in me not to--” “Risks?” She caught him up gayly. “Sakes! I run risks every day of my blessed life these times. When the Confederates aren’t stealing my chickens the Yankees are stealing my pigs. Or both of them in turns are stealing my cows. It’s a mercy my teeth are my own, or those would have gone, too, long ago.”