"Try to arouse him," he commanded. "Try again." The resources of his experience and his prescription blank had long since been exhausted. Flossy bent over her child and called softly: "Baby, dearest, mamma loves you. Won't you speak?" Ellis leaned forward. His face blanched. The rasping had ceased! Jap caught the look of horror, and dragged himself up to look into the baby's face. "He isn't dead! He's all right!" he shrieked, not knowing that he spoke. "He's still breathing. I can hear him." His hands grasped the cold body and lifted it, unconscious of the thing he was doing. "Oh, J. W.! Oh, J. W.!" he screamed, "don't go away from us!" He pressed the child to his breast convulsively, and the miracle happened. The solemn black eyes opened and a husky voice said, "Jappie." After the excitement was over, and the exhausted mother slept beside her sleeping child. Bill said humbly: "He did say 'Jap' first." "But he tried to say 'Bill,' too," Jap said loyally. The next morning, when the office had resumed its normal routine, a routine that was destined to be only partially interrupted by the death of Bill's second stepmother, a few days later, Ellis called Jap into the little back room where, in the dismal days before Flossy's coming, they had performed all the functions of housekeeping. He closed the door, as he laid his hand on Jap's shoulders. "You saved J. W.'s life," he said solemnly. "Doc Hall said that you stopped him, on the threshold, when you gave that dreadful cry." The baby did not rally, and Ellis worried about this incessantly. One day, some weeks after another mound had been added to the group in Judge Bowers's family lot, and Bill had gone with his father to appraise the merits of a prospective housekeeper from Birdtown, Ellis looked up from the proof he was correcting. Jap noted the anxiety in his face, and the gray eyes, that could so often render speech unnecessary, put the question. Ellis sighed. "He's not getting along the way he ought to," he mused. "Doc Hall prescribed a tonic for him a month ago; but it doesn't seem to take hold. He has no constitution to begin with. His father, exhausted by privation and ill-health, has handicapped him in the start. "Jap," he said, as he arose and laid one arm confidingly around the boy's shoulder, "you must remember that, in the years to come. I didn't give the baby a fair chance. He may need all the help he can get to carry him through. If you should live longer than I, you must be his father and big brother, both." Jap's gray eyes opened in astonishment. The idea that there could ever be a time when Ellis would not be there had never entered his mind. He looked into the dark, thin face with its pallor and its unnaturally bright eyes, and a joyous smile took the place of the momentary shock. "Doc Hall said that you had grit enough to outlive any disease that ever lurked in the brush of Bloomtown," he declared eagerly.