shop did not love
was Jud Carpenter. And many a time in his life the old man had
prayed: "O God, teach me to love Jud Carpenter and despise his ways."

Carpenter glared insolently at the old man quietly reading his paper,
and asked satirically. "Wal, what ails her, doctor?"

"Mill-icious fever," remarked the Bishop promptly with becoming
accent on the first syllable, and scarcely raising his eyes from the
paper.

Carpenter flushed. He had met the Bishop too often in contests which
required courage and brains not to have discovered by now that he was
no match for the man who could both pray and fight.

"They aint half as sick as they make out an' I've come to see about
it," he added. He felt the child's pulse. "She ain't sick to hurt.
That spinner is idle over yonder an' I guess I'll jes' be carryin'
her back. Wuck--it's the greatest tonic in the worl'--it's the
Hostetter's Bitters of life," he added, trying to be funny.

The Bishop looked up. "Yes, but I've knowed men to get so drunk on
bitters they didn't kno' a mill-dam from a dam'-mill!"

Carpenter smiled: "Wal, she ain't hurt--guess I'll jes' git her
cloze on an' take her over"--still feeling the child's wrist while
she shuddered and hid under the cover. Nothing but her arm was out,
and from the nervous grip of her little claw-like fingers the old man
could only guess her terrible fear.

"You sho'ly don't mean that, Jud Carpenter?" said the Bishop, with
surprise in his heretofore calm tone.

"Wal, that's jus' what I do mean, Doctor," remarked Carpenter dryly,
and in an irritated voice.

"Jud Carpenter," said the old man rising--"I am a man of God--it is
my faith an' hope. I'm gettin' old, but I have been a man in my day,
an' I've still got strength enough left with God's he'p to stop you.
You shan't tech that child."

In an instant Carpenter was ablaze--profane, abusive, insolent--and
as the old man stepped between him and the bed, the Whipper-in's
anger overcame all else.

The child under the cover heard a resounding whack and stuck her head
out in time to see the hot blood leap to the old man's cheeks where
Carpenter's blow had fallen. For a moment he paused, and then the
child saw the old overseer's huge fist gripping spasmodically, and
the big muscles of his arms and shoulders rolling beneath the folds
of his coat, as a crouching lion's skin rolls around beneath his mane
before he springs.

Again and again it gripped, and relaxed--gripped and rel