adornment to it or to her scant, tightly knotted hair, stood on the
porch impatiently waiting for him. Behind her, leaning in the doorway,
was her brother, John Webb, a red-haired, red-faced bachelor, fifty
years of age, who also had his eyes on the approaching reader.

"Another dun, I reckon," Mrs. Drake said, tentatively, when her
husband had paused at the bottom step and glanced up from the sheet in
his hand.

"Not this time." Tom slowly spat on the ground, and looked first at
his wife and then at his brother-in-law with a broadening smile. "You
two are as good at guessin' as the general run, but if I gave you a
hundred trials--yes, three hundred--and all day to do it in, you
wouldn't then come in a mile o' what's in this letter."

"I don't intend to try," Mrs. Drake said, eagerly, "anyways not with
all that ironin' to do that's piled up like a haystack on the dinin'-
room table, to say nothin' of the beds and bed-clothes to be sunned.
You can keep your big secret as far as I'm concerned."

"It's another Confederate Veteran excursion to some town whar whisky
is sold," said the bachelor, with a dry cackle. "That's my guess. You
fellows that was licked don't git no pensions from Uncle Sam, but you
manage to have enough fun once a year to make up for it."

Tom Drake swept the near-by mountain slope with his slow glance of
amusement, folded the sheet tantalizingly, and spat again.

"I don't know, Luce," he said to his wife, as he wiped his lips on his
shirt-sleeve, "that it is a good time to tell you on top o' your