Now and then she interpolated her efforts with such remarks as: "No, doan' move. De Colonel"--her sobriquet for Marny--"doan' keer whar he drap his seegars. But doan' you move, honey"--sobriquet for me. "I kin git 'em." Or "Clar to goodness, you pillows look like a passel o' hogs done tromple ye, yo're dat mussed." Critical remarks like these last were given in a low tone, and, although addressed to the offending articles themselves, accompanied by sundry cuffs of her big hand, were really intended to convey Aunt Chloe's private opinion of the habits of her master and his friends. The talk had drifted from men of the old frontier to border scouts, and then to the Kentucky mountaineers, whom Marny knows as thoroughly as he does the red men. "They are a great race, these mountaineers," he said to me, as he tossed the end of another cigarette on Aunt Chloe's now clean-swept floor. Marny spoke in crisp, detached sentences between the pats of his brush. "Big, strong, whalebone-and-steel kind of fellows; rather fight than eat. Quick as lightning with a gun; dead shots. Built just like our border men. See that scout astride of his horse?"--and he pointed with his mahl-stick to a sketch on the wall behind him--"looks like the real thing, don't he? Well, I painted him from an up-country moonshiner. Found him one morning across the river, leaning up against a telegraph pole, dead broke. Been arrested on a false charge of making whiskey without a license, and had just been discharged from the jail. Hadn't money enough to cross the bridge, and was half-starved. So I braced him up a little, and brought him here and painted him." We all know with what heartiness Marny can "brace." It doubtless took three cups of coffee, half a ham, and a loaf of bread to get him on his feet, Marny watching him with the utmost satisfaction until the process was complete.