he played over the deciding game in that day’s match at checkers by which, at the harness shop, he had vanquished an acclaimed rival from over Higgston way.  The fellow had been skilled beyond the average, but supremacy was still with the Newbern champion.  So absorbed was he, achieving again that last bit of strategy by which he had gained the place to capture two men and reach the enemy’s king row, that his soft-stepping daughter, who had come from the house, had to address him twice.

“Have you had a good day, father?”

The judge was momentarily confused.  He had to recall that his invalidism, not his checker prowess, was in question.  He regained his presence of mind; he coughed feebly, reaching a hand tenderly back to a point between his shoulder blades.

“Not one of my real bad days, Winona.  I can’t really say I’ve suffered.  Stuff that other cushion in back of me, will you?  I got a new pain kind of in this left shoulder—­neuralgia, mebbe.  But my sciatica ain’t troubled me—­not too much.”

Winona adjusted the cushion.

“You’re so patient, father!”

“I try to be, Winona,” which was simple truth.

A sufferer for years, debarred by obscure ailments from active participation in our industrial strife, the judge, often for days at a time, would not complain unless pressed to—­quite as if he had forgotten his pains.  The best doctors disagreed about his case, none of them able to say precisely what his maladies were.  True, one city doctor, a visiting friend of the Pennimans’ family physician, had once gone carefully over him, punching, prodding, listening, to announce that nothing ailed the invalid; which showed, as the judge had said to his face, that he was nothing but an impudent young squirt.  He had never revealed this parody of a diagnosis to his anxious family, who always believed the city doctor had found something deadly that might at any time carry off the patient sufferer.

The judge was also bitter about Christian Science, and could easily be led to expose its falsity.  He would wittily say it wasn’t Christian and wasn’t science; merely the chuckleheadedness of a lot of women.  This because a local adept of the cult had told him, and—­what was worse—­told Mrs. Penniman and Winona, that if he didn’t quit thinking he was an invalid pretty soon he would really have something the matter with him.

And he had incurred another offensive diagnosis:  Old Doc Purdy, the medical examiner, whose sworn testimony had years before procured the judge his pension as a Civil War veteran, became brutal about it.  Said Purdy:  “I had to think up some things that would get the old cuss his money and dummed if he didn’t take it all serious and think he did have ’em!”

The judge had been obliged to abandon all thoughts of a career.  Years before he had been Newbern’s justice of the peace, until a gang of political tricksters defeated the sovereign will of the people.  And perhaps he would again have accepted political honours, but none had been offered him.  Still, the family was prosperous.  For in addition to the pension, Mrs. Penniman kept a neat card in one of the front windows promising “Plain and Fancy Dressmaking Done Here,” and Winona now taught school.