his second drink, the colonel could vaguely recall only one Boompointer—­a blank skulking hound, sir—­a mean white shyster—­but, of course, he couldn’t have been of the same breed as such a blank fine woman as the widow!  It was here that Dick Blair interrupted with a heightened color and a glowing eulogy of the widow’s relations and herself, which, however, only increased the chivalry of the colonel—­who would be the last man, sir, to detract from—­or suffer any detraction of—­a lady’s reputation.  It was needless to say that all this was intensely diverting to the bystanders, and proportionally discomposing to Blair, who already experienced some slight jealousy of the colonel as a man whose fighting reputation might possibly attract the affections of the widow of the belligerent MacGlowrie.  He had cursed his folly and relapsed into gloomy silence until the colonel left.

For Dick Blair loved the widow with the unselfishness of a generous nature and a first passion.  He had admired her from the first day his lot was cast in Laurel Spring, where coming from a rude frontier practice he had succeeded the district doctor in a more peaceful and domestic ministration.  A skillful and gentle surgeon rather than a general household practitioner, he was at first coldly welcomed by the gloomy dyspeptics and ague-haunted settlers from riparian lowlands.  The few bucolic idlers who had relieved the monotony of their lives by the stimulus of patent medicines and the exaltation of stomach bitters, also looked askance at him.  A common-sense way of dealing with their ailments did not naturally commend itself to the shopkeepers who vended these nostrums, and he was made to feel the opposition of trade.  But he was gentle to women and children and animals, and, oddly enough, it was to this latter dilection that he owed the widow’s interest in him—­an interest that eventually made him popular elsewhere.

The widow had a pet dog—­a beautiful spaniel, who, however, had assimilated her graceful languor to his own native love of ease to such an extent that he failed in a short leap between a balcony and a window, and fell to the ground with a fractured thigh.  The dog was supposed to be crippled for life even if that life were worth preserving—­when Dr. Blair came to the rescue, set the fractured limb, put it in splints and plaster after an ingenious design of his own, visited him daily, and eventually restored him to his mistress’s lap sound in wind and limb.  How far this daily ministration and the necessary exchange of sympathy between the widow and himself heightened his zeal was not known.  There were those who believed that the whole thing was an unmanly trick to get the better of his rivals in the widow’s good graces; there were others who averred that his treatment of a brute beast like a human being was sinful and unchristian.  “He couldn’t have done more for a regularly baptized child,” said the postmistress.  “And what mo’ would a regularly baptized child have wanted?” returned Mrs. MacGlowrie, with the drawling Southern intonation she fell back upon when most contemptuous.