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 It was not until after Christmas that the flu came to them. Jerry had a light attack which kept him away from the stripping room for two weeks. Then when he was almost ready to return to work, Andy got it and was followed in a few days by Billy.

"If Annie gets it, it'll likely go hard with her," said Jerry, looking anxiously at the pale, self-contained little girl who was his favorite among the children. "We can't take her to mammy's 'cause dad's got it."

"An' I can't take her to my folks, 'cause Luelly's jes a-gittin' over it."

Judith did what she could to keep Annie away from her sick brothers. But one morning about a week after Billy had been taken sick, when she went to dress the little girl she saw that her cheeks were flushed with fever.

"I knowed there was no gittin away from it," she said grimly to Jerry, as she mixed a dose of castor oil with warm coffee.

On the third day Annie was so much worse that Jerry rode over to Clayton for Dr. MacTaggert.

It was late that night when the doctor's mud-spattered Ford came panting up the long hill and stopped before their door. The little man looked haggard and hollow-eyed from his constant attendance at sickbeds and his long hours of bumping over rutted roads and up and down steep, perilous trails to the tobacco growers' lonely shanties.

"It's pneumonia," he said, as he straightened up from his examination of the child's chest.

The blood sank away from Jerry's face, leaving it a sickly gray color, and he grasped the bedpost to steady himself.

"Can't you see your shakin' the child's bed," said Judith crossly in a grating voice.

The doctor said that she would have to be watched and tended carefully both day and night. Jerry let the tobacco stripping go and stayed at home to help with the nursing. The boys were now well on the way to recovery and beginning to be fractious and noisy. The father and mother took turns at