nd kept me
from being shot. Old Jeff's country stepped in and brought me off
under its wing while Roosevelt was having a gunboat painted and
waiting for the National Campaign Committee to look up whether I had
ever scratched the ticket."

"Isn't there a story in this, Barney?" I asked.

"No," said O'Keefe; "but I'll give you the facts. You know I went
down to Panama when this irritation about a canal began. I thought
I'd get in on the ground floor. I did, and had to sleep on it, and
drink water with little zoos in it; so, of course, I got the Chagres
fever. That was in a little town called San Juan on the coast.

"After I got the fever hard enough to kill a Port-au-Prince nigger,
I had a relapse in the shape of Doc Millikin.

"There was a doctor to attend a sick man! If Doc Millikin had your
case, he made the terrors of death seem like an invitation to a
donkey-party. He had the bedside manners of a Piute medicine-man and
the soothing presence of a dray loaded with iron bridge-girders.
When he laid his hand on your fevered brow you felt like Cap John
Smith just before Pocahontas went his bail.

"Well, this old medical outrage floated down to my shack when I sent
for him. He was build like a shad, and his eyebrows was black, and
his white whiskers trickled down from his chin like milk coming
out of a sprinkling-pot. He had a nigger boy along carrying an old
tomato-can full of calomel, and a saw.

"Doc felt my pulse, and then he began to mess up some calomel with
an agricultural implement that belonged to the trowel class.

"'I don't want any death-mask made yet, Doc,' I says, 'nor my liver
put in a plaster-of-Paris cast. I'm sick; and it's medicine I need,
not frescoing.'

"'You're a blame Yankee, ain't you?' asked Doc, going on mixing up
his Portland cement.

"'I'm from the North,' says I, 'but I'm a plain man, and don't care
for mural decorations. When you get the Isthmus all asphalted over
with that boll-weevil prescription, would you mind giving me a dose
of pain-killer, or a little strychnine on toast to ease up this
feeling of unhealthiness that I have got?"

"'They was all sassy, just like you,' says old Doc, 'but we lowered
their temperature considerable. Yes, sir, I reckon we sent a good
many of ye over to old _mortuis nisi bonum_. Look at Antietam and
Bull Run and Seven Pines and around Nashville! There never was a
battle where we didn't lick ye unless you was ten to our one. I knew
you were a bla