"That sounds reasonable, Amos; and, since there's no odium attached to a drafted man, it may be all the greater achievement in the long run when Jeb has worked himself up from the ranks. He'll be a better officer for it." "When is this registration?" Jeb tried to make his voice sound natural. "Next Tuesday," Mr. Strong answered over his shoulder. The Colonel was still preoccupied and did not look up. The next moment Jeb slipped out and turned, dizzily, into Main street. CHAPTER VI For the remainder of that week Jeb was an ill man. He could neither eat nor sleep, but paced restlessly about the garden, sometimes going far into the country and coming home exhausted. He did not realize that his panic-stricken mind was showing signs of its agony, or that his aunts were becoming greatly alarmed. But Sunday morning Miss Sallie and Miss Veemie held a consultation and decided to call Doctor Purdy--a gruff, good-natured friend of the family, who not infrequently dropped in for a cup of tea. This time he found his patient in the garden and was soon walking arm in arm with him. Later he rejoined the ladies on the front porch. "Is it serious?" they asked, in a breath. "Um," he answered, pursing his lips and looking out across the lawn, "no." They did not suspect that Doctor Purdy was utterly in the dark about Jeb's ailment; nor that in a general way he had diagnosed it to be love or debt, judging solely from a very evident depression. Neither did the man of medicine guess how dangerously ill in mind his patient had become; for Jeb, in the darkest hours of these days, during which he was imminently faced with conscription--meaning to him a hell of hells in a foreign battlefield--had so worked himself into an hysteria that personal injury seemed the easiest and only solution to his suffering. Were he to shoot off his finger, for instance, he would not be drafted! He had read of this being done in other countries! Or, he might point the rifle at his foot--but that, perhaps, would be a needless sacrifice. He had thought it carefully out, and had been actually on the point of deciding when the old physician appeared. Then Doctor Purdy, reading in his eyes the very image of despair, left good suggestions as the best medicine he then knew to bolster him up. The consequence was that Jeb, instead of resorting to wounds, settled on a better plan: he would become more ill, grow worse and worse, so that by Tuesday the doctor might carry a certificate to the registration place exempting him from service. He brightened wonderfully after this; he really became a hopeful looking invalid for one who intended to flirt shamelessly with death. He almost laughed. His appetite returned, and it was a hard knock for him to take to his bed instead of sitting down at the sumptuous feast which he knew Miss Sallie and Miss Veemie had provided. But bed it must be, and no dinner.