"You are a deserter, sir. The State gives no pension to any man who quit."

He took the sheet from the table in his remaining hand, from which the pen had dropped to the floor.

"What was the use?" the bent countryman asked. "Lee surrendered the few men he had left a few days after I quit him."

The clerk caught the paper in his teeth and, with the hand that held it, tore it in two pieces and flung the fragments on the floor.

"You should have been faithful to the end," he said.

"I went in at Manassas and I stayed till they left Richmond," the other replied. "It's only forty dollars. I've done without it fifty years. I reckon I can stand it."

He turned and hobbled out of the room. "He wasn't entitled to it, sir," said the clerk to the stranger, who had sat listening.

"Where did you lose your arm?" the latter queried, looking at the empty sleeve.

"The Crater," was the answer. "What command?" "Forty-Eighth Pennsylvania." The stranger sprang to his feet. "Forty-Eighth Pennsylvania? Why, I heard you say to that old Confederate he ought to have been faithful to the end. don't understand."

I

"Sit down, sir," said the clerk, "and I'll tell you, if you care to listen. I came here with the Union army in '65. I liked the country and the people. I stayed. I helped them some, when the negroes and the scalawags and the carpet-baggers gave them trouble. They were good to me. They made me clerk when they got the ballot back. I married my wife here. My children were born here. I have held this office for forty-seven years. I am the oldest court clerk in the State."

"I quit, after the end," said the stranger, contemplatively. "I wonder if I ought to have gone away?"

A lame old man wearing a bronze cross on the lapel of his coat that had on it: "Deo Vindice: 1861-1865, C. V.," limped into the room. He was burly of figure and his broad face beamed with good humor. He took off his straw hat, and

with a big cotton bandanna handerchief wiped his bald head fringed with wisps of gray hair.

"Come in and have a chair, Mr. Dillon," the clerk said to him.

"John," said the stranger, stepping forward to meet the lame man, "I reckon you've forgotten me."

The burly lame man gazed at him curiously.

"Ain't you Jim Fentress?" he asked. "There's something about you” "God bless you, John! It's been fifty years," said the stranger.

"And then some," exclaimed John Dillon as they threw their old arms about each other.

"Let's get outside in the shade, Jim," said the lame man. "Come out with us, major."

They hauled three chairs down the stone steps into the shadows flung by the immemorial oak-trees.

Two young men passed along the village street and looked at them.

'Ancient history," one of them said, pointing.

"In three volumes," said the other. They laughed and walked on. "Fifty-odd years, Jim," repeated John Dillon, regarding the stranger with misty eyes and beaming face.

He and the clerk filled and lighted their Powhatan clay pipes, with short fig-stems, and the man called Jim Fentress drew from a little leather case a cigarette wrapped in thin corn-shuck.

"Tell us where you've been, Jim, and what you've been doing all this time," said John Dillon.

"I couldn't stand it here after the war," the other replied, blowing the smoke through his nostrils. "I came back for a day and went away. My people were dead. My friends were dead or gone. My home was ruined and empty. The cause I had fought for was lost. You remember it all, John; but you had something to stay for-your mother, your sisters."

John Dillon nodded, with his pipe between his teeth.

"It is odd," the stranger continued, and then paused, looking up to the roof of the court-house.

"What, Jim?" queried John Dillon, re

moving his pipe and expelling a smoke cloud.

"That what made me go away brought me back.”

He looked up again as though once more seeking something he could not find. "I only thought of it then in that way," he said. "Now the whole thing is changed."

John Dillon and the clerk who had lost his arm at the Crater drew their chairs nearer to the speaker, wondering. The three old heads were very close together, and the smoke of the Virginia tobacco mingled with that of the Mexican ciga

rette.

"Like many others who had fought through the war and had nothing left to live for here," continued the man called Jim Fentress, "I determined, after it was over, to go to another country. I sold my father's old home for what it would fetch-a pittance-and went to Mexico. I became an exile."

"I have read the deed. It is recorded in yonder," said the clerk, nodding toward the court-house.

"Maximilian was there, and, though I have no liking for emperors and kings, it looked then as if I might get another brush at the another brush with the bluecoats," said the stranger. "The United States Government was talking about driving him out."

The clerk smiled at him. He remembered.

"But that fight never came off. Maximilian had his hands full with his Mexicans. I was with him in his last stand at the stone bridge by Queretaro; and when they shot him on the Hill of the Bells I thought I had had enough of fighting. But I hadn't, John."

"Did you get into any of their revolutions?" queried John Dillon.

The stranger paused to light another shuck-covered cigarette.

"I'll tell you," he said. "After that a feeling of restlessness got into me. I lived for a while in Mexico City. I went into a silver-mining proposition in the mountains of Chihuahua. I made money. I got into oil in Tampico. But I was never satisfied. I travelled over the whole blamed greaser country. I bought a hacienda and I farmed for a while. But all

the time there was something tugging at me to move. I never learned what it was until last June.”

His two auditors were listening eagerly. "I have spent much of my life in the saddle," he went on. "I have had some interesting adventures; but we'll leave them out to-day, gentlemen. I tried to cut myself off from the past, to forget. I read no American papers; and Mexican news-their assassinations and insurrections-did not appeal to me. Neither Diaz, in his day, nor Gonzales, nor Madero, nor old Huerta concerned me. What I want to tell you now is what brought me home."

They saw that his eyes once more sought the court-house roof.

I

"It was the flag that was up there when came back after the war. That flag sent me away and it fetched me back." A light illuminated the face of the onearmed clerk; and John Dillon beamed.

"On a morning of last June I was riding-riding aimlessly, as I so often rode. I think of myself now as eternally riding and riding down there-a sort of wandering Jew on horseback. As I rode I heard a sound which I hadn't heard since the emperor's time. I had kept away from their rows. It was the unmistakable and unforgettable noise of battle. I spurred in its direction and I came upon a sight that seemed to clutch my heart and stir all my blood as in the old days when you and I rode with Jeb Stuart, John. Not far from a little Mexican town that I had just passed through I saw on one side a squadron of negro cavalry, led by three or four white officers, engaged in a desperate conflict with a horde of armed greasers on the other. One of the negro soldiers carried a flag. It was the flag that I had last seen up yonder. The negroes were charging the Mexicans when I got there, and the racket of the shooting and the charging was infernal. I learned later that the black soldiers had been ambushed.

"The sight of that flag in the midst of that battle had a strange effect on me. wanted to get near it, to fight for it, to go with it into the fiery hell that the greasers were making with their machine guns. They are new guns, John. We didn't have 'em in the old days.

"I recalled, as I plunged the spurs into my horse and rode toward the flag, how my father had told me that he had fought for it with Taylor at Buena Vista and how hard it was for him to leave it when the Union was broken up.

"I had carried a pistol for more than forty years. A gun is a friend in trouble down there in Mexico. Something inside me kept telling me that the greasers were fighting my father's flag.

"I rode into the thick of that bloody scrimmage, as near as I could get to the soldier who carried the flag. I felt that I must get close to it and go with it. Those machine guns were ripping out the bullets, and they were singing like bees. As I reached the color-sergeant's side a Mexican bullet hit him, and he fell from his horse like a log. I caught the flag and carried it forward. I yelled, with my pistol in one hand and the flag in the other, while the bridle hung loose on my horse's neck: "This is my father's flag!""

"I've seen you charge, Jim," said John Dillon. "I wish I could have been right there with you!"

His eyes shone with the light of ancient battle.

"When the fight was over and we had to go back in face of the heavy odds against us, I swung on to the flag. The greasers killed or captured nearly one-half of our squadron, but they paid the price and we kept the flag."

The clerk held out his hand and the exile clasped it. John Dillon, stirred by the story, arose from his chair.

'Go on, Jim," he said excitedly. "Go

on!"

"But the strangest thing was what happened afterward. I went with them when the troop returned to the main column, and the general thanked me. He sent me to El Paso with a despatch.

"I stayed there till the greasers brought the prisoners back; and I saw them come across the bridge. The wounded colorsergeant was with them. His arm was in a sling. I spoke to him, and when he looked at me he said: 'Are you the man I heard hollerin' about his father's flag?' I said I was. Then he asked me: Who

was your father and what were you talkin' about?' I said my father's name was Henry Fentress and. that his flag was the flag of the Union, that I had not seen for fifty years until I saw him carrying it in that fight.

"Then he told me that his grandfather had belonged to a man of that name on a plantation here on this river, and I asked him who he was. 'Why, I played ringtaw and knucks and leap-frog with your grandfather when I was a boy,' I said."

"That was Jack Mullin's son," interrupted John Dillon. "The old man told me that he was a soldier in the cavalry."

"When I parted with him at El Paso he gave me this," continued the exile, thrusting his hand into his left breast pocket and drawing from it an envelope. He opened it and took out a little silk banner. "You seem to like your father's flag, so I got this one for you,' he said to me. 'I'll keep it, sergeant,' I said to him. 'It's mine now.""

John Dillon took the tiny ensign in his hand and regarded it curiously. Then he handed it to the clerk.

"That was my father's flag," said the exile, following it with his eyes.

"Our fathers' flag," said the clerk, who had lost his arm at the Crater.

"Our fathers' flag," repeated the returned Confederate solemnly.

Then he added: "And our flag, old Forty-Eighth Pennsylvania!"

"It beats the world, Jim!" exclaimed John Dillon, taking back the little banner and smoothing it caressingly.

The Union clerk shook hands with the Confederate exile again.

"I tell you it beats the world, major!" repeated John Dillon, handing it back to the exile and slapping the clerk on the shoulder above his empty sleeve.

"Same old volumes," said one of the young men to the other as they returned along the grass-grown street.

"Same old ancient history," the other replied. "Good old volumes and good old history. You can bet dollars to doughnuts they're talking about their 'way back yonder."

AT Pat Kelly, cook on U. S. Dredge No. 8, poured three ounces of lemon extract into a goblet, added three ounces of vanilla, and drank the resulting Gentle Annie with a grunt of disappointment, convinced by his fifth morning's morning that quantity could never substitute for quality.

His grimace of disgust expanded into an undulating shiver which explored the remotest fibres of his ponderous body. The hula-hula exercise concluded, he festooned his professional July dishabille with a large rusty dish-pan, a meat-saw, and a long knife, after which he hesitated sideways out of the narrow door of his galley. He shuffled four paces aft and squeezed into the refreshing coolness of the refrigerator-room, where he set about the business of hewing off assorted segments of round steak for the noon meal. Fifty feet for'd, in his eight-by-twelve office, Captain Dan Porter, perspiring freely, played the four of spades on the five of clubs. This departure from Cap'n Dan's habitual observance of the sacred pact which obtains between Ol' Sol and all true river men may have been provoked by one paragraph of a letter from Colonel McDonald, Corps of Engineers, U. S. A., addressed to Daniel Porter, Master U. S. Dredge No. 8, which follows: "Serious consequences may attend a repetition of dredging costs equal to those of your last month's work. The Mississippi River Commission, accompanied by Senator Cromwell and myself, will leave St. Louis next Monday on the annual inspection trip. Upon our arrival at your dredge Monday afternoon I will explain to you the necessity for reducing cost of dredging."

Fifty miles up-stream, in his St. Louis office, Colonel McDonald abstractedly skipped two pages of a violent struggle in

volving Nicholas Carter, Yen Chi Han, and seven million dollars' worth of smuggled opium. Subconsciously the colonel contemplated the problem presented in a reply to his letter which he had that morning received from Cap'n. Dan Porter:

"I can reduce dredging costs by working three crews on this dredge and running twenty-four hours per day, but with a single crew as at present, and with our fires banked half the time, the costs this month will probably exceed the record established last month."

Meanwhile, Kelly cut meat. Submerged beneath the frequent drafts of flavoring extracts his nervous tremors had subsided to a gentle rhythm which synchronized with the measured kick of the engines on the deck below. None but an expert could have observed that Kelly's shakes were his personal property. Otto, the Proosian pastry cook, was an expert observer. Upon Kelly's departure from the galley the ambitious and treasonable Otto had puffed at the flame of jealousy that ever burned within his narrow chest, and had addressed a characteristic criticism of his absent chief to young Jerry Monahan, waiter.

"Again der king iss sopping up der Gentle Annies," Otto remarked, "und by der efning train for der drinking jag by Saint Looie we will lose him. Und I will der meat cook be!"

Jerry Monahan, violent in his Celtic loyalty, selected several expressive epithets from an almost complete vocabulary of vituperative phrases and drowned the indiscreet Otto in a deluge of profane eloquence. "Wat's it to youse, you duffjugglin' Dutch cheese," he concluded, "if Paddy needs his July jag! Braid them bretzels an' lay off knockin' me boss!"

Otto subsided into a black shell of silent rage, directed at humanity in general but specifically the Biddle Street Irish

"Jerry, c'mere an' fetch these steaks
Before I scalp you."

Summoned by his chief, the boy jumped to obey, inspired by an impulse to display to Otto the strength of the bond which existed between members of a fraternity in which the Proosian could never be received.

"Thirty slugs av round f'r th' bums, sivin T-bones f'r th' engineers, but bless me, Jerry, what to cut f'r Cap'n Dan I dunno."

Jerry lifted the dish-pan and its cargo of meat. "Ain't that iligant, Paddy, where we hit th' high tone on th' 'moohoon-beams'? Why not cut wan av thim tinderloin f'r Cappy?"

"What talk have you!" the cook reproved. "An' him eatin' bakin'-soda th' lasht foive days f'r th' stomach av 'um. You'd be assassinatin' th' man wid tinderloin 'tis a dainty th' system av 'um needs. If all av thim corn-beef weren't ate up now. . . .'

"I have ut! I have ut, Paddy!" the waiter exclaimed. "Frog-legs, Paddy. Wan av thim green frogs roosts av mornin's under th' willys ferninst th' slough." The cook turned an admiring look at his helper. "Lad," he said, "wid that brain ye'll be a cook yet. I'll fry 'um wid butther an' Cappy'll be soggy wid th' pleasure av eatin' 'um an' thin I'll get me a leave f'r to-morrow in Sint Loose."

"Th' fireman, Tender Eye, he have a twinty-two I'll get th' lend av it off 'um, Paddy, an'an'"

"Ye will not," the cook interrupted,

"an' me able to cast a knife through th' divvils at fifty feet. Row me ashore by th' slough an' I'll stab th' green felly f'r Cappy's dinner in wan second."

Jerry placed the pan of steaks on the galley table where the heat could improve them, twisted his apron into a belt around his waist and went aft and below. Presently, seated in a skiff, he hung 'longside the dredge awaiting his chief. The cook bathed his nerves with another enamel of Gentle Annie, selected a long and heavy knife, and joined his assistant in the skiff. They rowed to the shore and beached the bow of the skiff in the plastic margin of the Mississippi, and then, afoot, they made their way to the up-stream bank of a muddy tributary which near there mingled its reluctant waters with the darker currents of the big river.

In silence they stalked through the grasses which lined the bank of the slough, arriving finally at the big willow-tree which marked the domain of their intended prey. The cook crouched, with difficulty, and on hands and knees he crept to the edge of the bank. He parted the thick growth of dusty weeds that verged the brink, and through this opening inspected the muddy bank up-stream and down. He discovered his victim.

"Ten feet beyant th' snag, Jerry," he whispered to his companion, who, like a faithful setter, had charged along behind his master. "Whisht-bigger nor a bassdrum an' fasht asleep. Stay here whilst I slay 'um."

His assistant demurred. "Ah, Paddy, l'ave me watch you."

"Quiet, then," the cook assented, "an' no whishperin' whin we get forninst th' little baste."

The pair crept to the point of attack. The frog rested comfortably in the gratifying mud at the water's edge, ten feet below his assassins.

The cook stood half upright on the edge of the bank. He made a preliminary gesture to assure himself of clearance. He held the knife by its point. He drew back his great right arm in preparation for the fatal throw. Steel death launched fair at the motionless prey, but with the menace of the gleaming metal instinct tensed the motor muscles of the frog and he leaped in a sprawling parabola to the safety of