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 standing man, her worn face lighting with a proud and wonderful smile. She reached out one veined and calloused hand and took one of her son’s. Then smiling cheerily down at the prostrate man, she continued to dip the handkerchief, in the waiting-room tin washbasin and gently apply it to his temple. She had the benevolent garrulity of old age.

“I ain’t seen my son before,” she continued, “in eight years. One of my nephews, Elkanah Price, he’s a conductor on one of them railroads and he got me a pass to come out here. I can stay a whole week on it, and then it’ll take me back agin. Jest think, now, that little boy of mine has got to be a officer—a city marshal of a whole town! That’s somethin’ like a constable, ain’t it? I never knowed he was a officer; he didn’t say nothin’ about it in his letters. I reckon he thought his old mother’d be skeered about the danger he was in. But, laws! I never was much of a hand to git skeered. ’Tain’t no use. I heard them guns a-shootin’ while I was gittin’ off them cars, and I see smoke a-comin’ out of the depot, but I jest walked right along. Then I see son’s face lookin’ out through the window. I knowed him at oncet. He met me at the door, and squeezed me ’most to death. And there you was, sir, a-lyin’ there jest like you was dead, and I ’lowed we’d see what might be done to help sot you up.”

“I think I’ll sit up now,” said the concussion patient. “I’m feeling pretty fair by this time.”