I must have looked bewildered.  “The war was over,” I said vacantly, “in—­”

O’Keefe laughed loudly, scattering my thoughts.

“Ask old Doc Millikin if the war is over!” he shouted, hugely diverted.  “Oh, no!  Doc hasn’t surrendered yet.  And the Confederate States!  Well, I just told you they bucked officially and solidly and nationally against a foreign government four months ago and kept me from being shot.  Old Jeff’s country stepped in and brought me off under its wing while Roosevelt was having a gunboat painted and waiting for the National Campaign Committee to look up whether I had ever scratched the ticket.”

“Isn’t there a story in this, Barney?” I asked.

“No,” said O’Keefe; “but I’ll give you the facts.  You know I went down to Panama when this irritation about a canal began.  I thought I’d get in on the ground floor.  I did, and had to sleep on it, and drink water with little zoos in it; so, of course, I got the Chagres fever.  That was in a little town called San Juan on the coast.

“After I got the fever hard enough to kill a Port-au-Prince nigger, I had a relapse in the shape of Doc Millikin.

“There was a doctor to attend a sick man!  If Doc Millikin had your case, he made the terrors of death seem like an invitation to a donkey-party.  He had the bedside manners of a Piute medicine-man and the soothing presence of a dray loaded with iron bridge-girders.  When he laid his hand on your fevered brow you felt like Cap John Smith just before Pocahontas went his bail.

“Well, this old medical outrage floated down to my shack when I sent for him.  He was build like a shad, and his eyebrows was black, and his white whiskers trickled down from his chin like milk coming out of a sprinkling-pot.  He had a nigger boy along carrying an old tomato-can full of calomel, and a saw.

“Doc felt my pulse, and then he began to mess up some calomel with an agricultural implement that belonged to the trowel class.

“‘I don’t want any death-mask made yet, Doc,’ I says, ’nor my liver put in a plaster-of-Paris cast.  I’m sick; and it’s medicine I need, not frescoing.’

“‘You’re a blame Yankee, ain’t you?’ asked Doc, going on mixing up his Portland cement.

“‘I’m from the North,’ says I, ’but I’m a plain man, and don’t care for mural decorations.  When you get the Isthmus all asphalted over with that boll-weevil prescription, would you mind giving me a dose of pain-killer, or a little strychnine on toast to ease up this feeling of unhealthiness that I have got?”

“‘They was all sassy, just like you,’ says old Doc, ’but we lowered their temperature considerable.  Yes, sir, I reckon we sent a good many of ye over to old mortuis nisi bonum.  Look at Antietam and Bull Run and Seven Pines and around Nashville!  There never was a battle where we didn’t lick ye unless you was ten to our one.  I knew you were a blame Yankee the minute I laid eyes on you.’