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would not trust the prying eyes and sharper curiosity of the local postmaster with that letter to the state medical board in the matter of Old Doc Ross. It must go by registered mail, which made an errand for Elizabeth to the post office. If Dr. Hall would wait a minute while she smoothed up her countenance, she said, she would trot along with him that far on his way back to the boxcar beside the track.

Dr. Hall was willing enough. He never had appeared in public with Elizabeth, he never had seen what her behavior abroad was like. He wondered if she would appear presently weighted down by a gun, and from that speculation galloped on to a more disturbing one: whether she ever had shot a cigar out of a voter's mouth in Damascus.

He discounted the probability to zero. That was some distortion of public report, a tradition without foundation taken up by new arrivals like Jim Justice, and colored to fit their own melodramatic tastes. Justice had called her a wild girl, profanely wild. Dr. Hall reflected that he had seen quieter, more retiring and colorless ones, but he never had met a more modest one.

He could not recall a girl half as charming out of all the clouds of them that had drifted like autumn butter flies across his road. He remembered sorority houses