efore then. If you feel like turnin' in for a sleep, we'll take care of
you when you get up."

Morgan said he had sleep enough to carry him over the day. Dora,
yawning, disheveled, appeared in the dining-room door at that moment,
tying her all-enveloping white apron around her like Poor Polly Bawn.
She blushed when she saw Morgan, and put up her hands to smooth her
hair.

"I had the best sleep last night I can remember in a coon's age--I felt
so _safe_," she said.

"You always was safe enough," Conboy told her, not in the best of humor.

"Safe enough! I can show you five bullet holes in the walls of my room,
Mr. Morgan--one of 'em through the head of my bed!"

"Pretty close," Morgan said, answering the animation of her rosy,
friendly face with a smile.

"Never mind about bullet holes--you go and begin makin' holes in a piece
of biscuit dough," her father commanded.

"When I get good and ready," said Dora, serenely. "You wouldn't care if
we got shot to pieces every night as long as we could get up in the
morning and make biscuits!"

"Yes, and some of you'd be rootin' around somebody else's kitchen for
biscuits to fill your craws if this town laid dead a little while
longer," Conboy fired back, his true feeling in the matter revealed.

"I can get a job of biscuit shooter any day," Dora told him, untroubled
by the outlook of disaster that attended upon peace and quiet. "I'd
rather not have no guests than drunks that come in stagger blind and
shoot the plaster off of the wall. It ain't so funny to wake up with
your ears full of lime! Ma's sick of it, and I'm sick of it, and it'd be
a blessin' if Mr. Morgan would keep the joints all shut till the drunks
in this town dried up like dead snakes!"

"You, and your ma!" Conboy grumbled, bearing on an old grievance, an old
theme of servitude and discontent.

Morgan recalled the gaunt anxiety of Mrs. Conboy's eyes, hollow of every
emotion, as they seemed, but unrest and straining fear. Dora had gone
unmarked yet by the cursed fires of Ascalon; only her tongue discovered
that the poison of their fumes had reached her heart.

"I'd like to put strickenine in some of their biscuits!" Dora declared,
with passionate vehemence.

"Tut-tut! no niggers----"

"How's your face, Mr. Morgan?" Dora inquired, out of one mood into
another so quickly the transition was bewildering.

"Face?" said Morgan, embarrassed for want of her meaning. "Oh," putting
his hand to the forgotten wo