Percy Northumberland Driscoll, brother to the judge, and younger than he
by five years, was a married man, and had had children around his
hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup, and
scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his effective
antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty. He was a prosperous
man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune was growing. On
the first of February, 1830, two boy babes were born in his house; one to
him, one to one of his slave girls, Roxana by name. Roxana was twenty
years old. She was up and around the same day, with her hands full, for
she was tending both babes.

Mrs. Percy Driscoll died within the week. Roxy remained in charge of the
children. She had her own way, for Mr. Driscoll soon absorbed himself in
his speculations and left her to her own devices.

In that same month of February, Dawson's Landing gained a new citizen.
This was Mr. David Wilson, a young fellow of Scotch parentage. He had
wandered to this remote region from his birthplace in the interior of the
State of New York, to seek his fortune. He was twenty-five years old,
college bred, and had finished a post-college course in an Eastern law
school a couple of years before.

He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an intelligent
blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a covert twinkle of
a pleasant sort. But for an unfortunate remark of his, he would no doubt
have entered at once upon a successful career at Dawson's Landing. But he
made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village, and it
"gaged" him. He had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens
when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself
very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as