Every eye turned toward the advancer of the bid,--a long man, with a wild red beard. For a few minutes, the bidding between Mr. Ephriam Doggett and a derisive competitor advanced by cents, and half-cents, but one dollar marked the end of the bids, and Mr. Doggett became, for the space of ten months, Dunaway's legal owner. In the summers past, worms had been bad in the Kentucky tobacco fields, but this year, they came in numbers like the Assyrian army: by the middle of August, at the time of the leaving off of the spraying with Paris green, Mr. Doggett was, according to the words of his mouth, "in a tight place." "Hands" were at a premium: his sons, Marshall and Jappy, had a crop of their own several miles off; Mr. Brock had slyly induced two of Mr. Doggett's "promised" men to stop with him: Mr. Doggett's aids--Dock, Joey, Gran'dad, the brothers, Bunch and Knox Trisler, and his cousins, Roscoe and Ob Doggett, numbered but seven, when there should have been ten, for the worming and the suckering. Something had to be done, and on court day, with his seven left behind to do battle against the green army, Mr. Doggett went to town in search of a "hand." He heard on the street of the vagrancy sale, and seized the opportunity offered him to secure a free hireling. Time was precious to Mr. Doggett, and fifteen minutes after his one dollar bill went into the pocket of the County's representative, the new acquisition was seated beside him behind the abbreviated tail of Big Money. "We'll go right on out," he said cheerfully to his purchase: "although," he added thoughtfully, "I wuz on the p'int o' fergittin' hit--you'll want to git your clothes. I'll jest drive by, and you can git 'em." At the door of the yellow cottage on a rear street, Dunaway pointed out as the residence of his father-in-law, Mr. Doggett drew rein. This building, for five months from the day of his marriage, had been Dunaway's home, until his father-in-law, a one-armed pensioner, grew tired of waiting for him to add a day to the six days of manual labor he did during the term of his married life, and instituted vagrancy proceedings. The hospitality of the Kentuckian is great and lasting, but even gold will wear thin in time. "I reckon," delicately hinted Mr. Doggett, "considerin' you hain't exactly in faver with your folks, _I'd_ better go in the house fer the clothes." "You needn't say _clothes_ here," the peppery little man who answered Mr. Doggett's knock informed him, when he had stated his business. "I'll allow you to have them garments he's got coverin' his worthless hide, but the others, they'll have to go to pay a little on what he's eat off of me since Nan got took in last March! I feel sorry for you, man," he concluded, dryly, "ef you are goin' to undertake to keep him fed. I might have been able to put up with what he et at the table, but the between-meal business of runnin' into victuals and eatin' was more than my pension would stand up against!"