The Doctor flushed; his loose skin twitched around his nostrils, and he gripped his chair arms. He did not answer for nearly a minute, during which the Judge tilted back in his chair beside the desk and looked at the elder man with some show of curiosity, if not of interest. "My price," sneered the Doctor, "is a little mite low to-day. It's a pelt--a hound pup's pelt and you are going to furnish it, if you'll stop strutting long enough for me to skin you!" The two men glared at each other. Then Van Dorn, regaining his poise, answered: "Well, sir, I'm going to win--no matter how--I'm going to win. I've sat up with this situation every night for six months--Oh, for a year. I know it backwards and forwards, and you can't trip me any place along the line. I've counted you out." He went on smiling: "What have I done that is not absolutely legal? This is a government of law, Doctor--not of hysteria. The trouble with you," the Judge settled down to an upright position in his chair, "is that you're an old maid. You're so--so" he drawled the "so" insolently, "damn nice. You're an old maid, and you come from a family of old maids. I warrant your grandmother and her mother before her were old maids. There hasn't been a man in your family for five generations." The Doctor rose, Van Dorn went on arrogantly, "Doctor James Nesbit, I'm not afraid of you. And I'll tell you this: If you make a fight on me in this contest, when I'm elected, we'll see if there isn't one less corrupt boss in this state and if Greeley County can't contribute a pompadour to the rogues' gallery and a tenor voice to the penitentiary choir." During the harangue of the Judge, the Doctor's full lips had begun to twitch in a smile, and his eyes to twinkle. Then he chirped gaily: "Heap o' steam for the size of the load and weight of your biler, Tom. Better hoop 'em up!" And with a laugh, shaking his little round stomach, he toddled out of the room into the corridor, and began whistling the tune that tells what will happen when Johnny comes marching home. So the Doctor whistled about his afternoon's work and did not realize that the whistling was a form of nervousness. That evening the Doctor and Laura began to read their Browning where they had left off the night before. They were in the midst of "Paracelsus," when the father looked up and said: "Laura, you know I'm going to fight Tom Van Dorn for another term as district judge?" "Why, of course you should, father--I didn't expect he'd ask it again!" said the daughter.