It was nearly midnight. The half-burned hull of the barracks in the deserted bottom below the Old Fort still smoked a little, but it no longer blazed. Its late occupants--all save one--slept in the P. A. & O. V. roundhouse, half a mile away, under police and clerical protection; this one was in a cell in the county jail, safe and sound, and it is probable that he slept also. That linguistic prodigy, Master Tony Wolfe Tone Palassi, being excessively awearied, snored in soft, little-boy snores at his mother's side; and over him she cried tears of pride and visited soft kisses on his flushed, upturned face. To the family of the Palassis much honour had accrued--not forgetting the Callahans. At eleven o'clock the local correspondent of the _Courier-Journal_ and other city papers had called up to know where he might get copies of her son's latest photograph for widespread publication abroad. The rest of the town, generally speaking, was at this late hour of midnight, also abed; but in the windows of Doctor Lake's office, on the second floor of the Planters' Bank building, lights burned, and on the leather couch in Doctor Lake's inner room a pudgy figure, which breathed heavily, was stretched at full length, its hands passively flat on its breast, its head done up in many windings of cotton batting and surgical bandages. Above this figure stood old Doctor Lake, holding in the open palm of his left hand a small, black, flattened object. The door leading to the outer office opened a foot and the woe-begone face and dripping eyes of Judge Priest appeared through the slit. “Get out!” snapped Doctor Lake without turning his head. “Lew, it's me!” said Judge Priest in the whisper that any civilised being other than a physician or a trained nurse instinctively assumes in the presence of a certain dread visitation. “I jest natchelly couldn't wait no longer--not another minute! I wouldn't 'a' traded one hair off of Jimmy Bagby's old grey head fur all the Beaver Yancys that ever was whelped. Lew, is there a chance?” “Billy Priest,” said Doctor Lake severely, “the main trouble with you is that you're so liable to go off half-cocked. Beaver Yancy's not going to die--you couldn't kill him with an ax. I don't know how that story got round to-night. And Jim Bagby's all right too, except he's going to have one whale of a headache tomorrow. The bullet glanced round his skull and stopped under the scalp. Here 'tis--I just got it out.... Oh, Lord! Now look what you've done, bursting in here and blubbering all around the place!” The swathed form on the couch sat up and cocked an eye out from beneath a low-drawn fold of cheesecloth. “Is that you, Judge?” demanded Sergeant Bagby in his usual voice and in almost his usual manner. “Yes, Jimmy; it's me.” Judge Priest projected himself across the room toward his friend. He didn't run; he didn't jump; he didn't waddle--he projected himself. “Yes, Jimmy, it's me.”