Mother was already asleep and there was no way for him to know who it really was in the parlor, so he took his shoes off and slammed them down in vain, and rattled out the ashes, and wound the clock, and coughed and sneezed. By this time he was awfully sleepy, for it was a cold night and he had had a long drive, so he went to bed and to sleep. Along about twelve o'clock father woke up, and seeing a light still in the parlor, tried to get mother roused up long enough to ask her what else she supposed he might use besides _dynamite_ to run that fellow off. Mother was still so sleepy that she didn't say anything, so father got out of bed and opened his bedroom door. There were voices talking very easy in the parlor, so father, thinking that surely Ann Lisbeth would be ready to commit suicide by this time, decided he would walk to the front door and open and shut it real loud, knowing _that_ would run him off, without waiting to slip on his trousers. Now, father is long and lank, and wears old-timey bob-tail night-shirts, winter and summer; and all the rooms of our house open _square_ into that one big hall--and there are no curtains to hide behind! Just as father reached the front door and began tampering with the lock, out walked the happy pair from the parlor and they must have had a mighty tumble off of Mount Olympus or Pegasus, or whatever that place is called. They jumped back as quickly as they could, but of course they couldn't get back quickly enough to suit all parties concerned. Father finally got the door open and, to keep from having to pass the parlor door again, he ran _clear_ around that big, rambling house, bare-footed, and with the February moon shining down on him and the February wind whistling through his little bob-tail night-shirt. The noise of so many doors opening and shutting made mother wake up in a hurry, and, being used to father's ways of leaping, then looking afterward, she realized what had happened. Poor father came around to the side porch and scratched on the bedroom door for mother to let him in. By this time she was so near dead from laughing that she could hardly speak, but managed to use her voice a little, just to pay him back for doing such an idiotic thing, she said. She opened the bedroom door a little, so Doctor Gordon and Ann Lisbeth could hear, then called out in a loud, distressed voice: "Oh, Dan! _Have_ you come home in _that condition_ again?" Everybody that knows father knows that he never drank a drop of anything stronger than soothing-syrup in his life; and when he had met Doctor Gordon in the city they hadn't been able to get off the subject of prohibition, they both were so temperate. It was a terrible thing to be called "in that condition" before _him_! But mother let him in, and Doctor Gordon caught his train back to the city where he sent father at least _two_ dozen funny post-cards on the subject of "that condition." CHAPTER III