Midnight had found Gaylord Ravenal, in nightshirt and dressing gown, a handsome and distraught figure, pounding on the door of his mother-in-law’s cabin. From the cabin he had just left came harrowing sounds—whimpers, and little groans, and great moans, like an animal in agony. Magnolia Ravenal was not one of your silent sufferers. She was too dramatic for that. Manœuvred magically by the expert Hooper, they managed to make a perilous landing just above Cairo. The region was scoured for a doctor, without success, for accident had followed on flood. Captain Andy had tracked down a stout and reluctant midwife who consented only after an enormous bribe to make the perilous trip to the levee, clambering ponderously down the slippery bank with many groanings and forebodings, and being sustained, both in bulk and spirit, by the agile and vivacious little captain much as a tiny fussy river tug guides a gigantic and unwieldy ocean liner. He was almost frantically distraught, for between Andy Hawks and his daughter Magnolia Ravenal was that strong bond of affection and mutual understanding that always exists between the henpecked husband and the harassed offspring of a shrew such as Parthy Ann Hawks.
When, an hour later, Gaylord Ravenal, rain-soaked and mud-spattered, arrived with a white-faced young doctor’s assistant whose first obstetrical call this was, he found the fat midwife already in charge and inclined to elbow about any young medical upstart who might presume to dictate to a female of her experience.
It was a sordid and ravaging confinement which, at its climax, teetered for one dreadful moment between tragedy and broad comedy. For at the crisis, just before dawn, the fat midwife, busy with ministrations, had said to the perspiring young doctor, “D’you think it’s time to snuff her?”
Bewildered, and not daring to show his ignorance, he had replied, judicially, “Uh—not just yet. No, not just yet.”
Again the woman had said, ten minutes later, “Time to snuff her, I’d say.”
“Well, perhaps it is.” He watched her, fearfully, wondering what she might mean; cursing his own lack of knowledge. To his horror and amazement, before he could stop her, she had stuffed a great pinch of strong snuff up either nostril of Magnolia Ravenal’s delicate nose. And thus Kim Ravenal was born into the world on the gust of a series of convulsive a-CHOOs!
“God almighty, woman!” cried the young medico, in a frenzy. “You’ve killed her.”
“Run along, do!” retorted the fat midwife, testily, for she was tired by now, and hungry, and wanted her coffee badly. “H’m! It’s a gal. And they had their minds all made up to a boy. Never knew it to fail.” She turned to Magnolia’s mother, a ponderous and unwieldy figure at the foot of the bed. “Well, now, Mis’—Hawks, ain’t it?—that’s right—Hawks. Well, now, Mis’ Hawks, we’ll get this young lady washed up and then I’d thank you for a pot of coffee and some breakfast. I’m partial to a meat breakfast.”
All this had been a full hour ago. Magnolia Ravenal still lay inert, unheeding. She had not even looked at her child. Her mother now uttered bitter complaint to the others in the room.
“Won’t touch a drop of this good nourishing broth. Knocked the spoon right out of my hand, would you believe it! for all she lays there looking so gone. Well! I’m going to open her mouth and pour it down.”