Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

“Mister Clerk,” bade Judge Priest, “adjourn the present term of this court.”

As the crowd filed noisily out, old Doctor Lake, who had been a spectator of all that happened, lingered behind and, with a nod and a gesture to the clerk, went round behind the jury-box and entered the door of the judge’s private chamber, without knocking. The lone occupant of the room stood by the low, open window, looking out over the green square. He was stuffing the fire-blackened bowl of his corncob pipe with its customary fuel; but his eyes were not on the task, or his fingers trembled – or something; for, though the pipe was already packed to overflowing, he still tamped more tobacco in, wasting the shreddy brown weed upon the floor.

“Come in, Lew, and take a chair and set down,” he said. Doctor Lake, however, instead of taking a chair and sitting down, crossed to the window and stood beside him, putting one hand on the judge’s arm.

“That was pretty hard on old Press, Billy,” said Doctor Lake.

Judge Priest was deeply sensitive of all outside criticism pertaining to his official conduct; his life off the bench was another matter. He stiffened under the touch.

“Lewis Lake,” he said – sharply for him – “I don’t permit even my best friends to discuss my judicial acts.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that, Billy,” Doctor Lake made haste to explain. “I wasn’t thinking so much of what happened just now in the court yonder. I reckon old Press deserved it – he’s been running hog-wild round this town and this county too long already. Let him get that temper of his roused and a few drinks in him and he is a regular mad dog. Nobody can deny that. Of course I hate it – and I know you do too – to see one of the old company – one of the boys who marched out of here with us in ‘61 – going to the pen. That’s only natural; but I’m not finding fault with your sending him there. What I was thinking of is that you’re sending him over the road day after tomorrow.”

“What of that?” asked the judge.

“Why, day after tomorrow is the day we’re starting for the annual reunion,” said Doctor Lake; “and, Billy, if Press goes on the noon train – which he probably will – he’ll be traveling right along with the rest of us – for a part of the way. Only he’ll get off at the Junction, and we – well, we’ll be going on through, the rest of us will, to the reunion That’s what I meant.”

“That’s so!” said the judge regretfully – “that’s so! I did forget all about the reunion startin’ then – I plum’ forgot it. I reckin it will be sort of awkward for all of us – and for Press in particular.” He paused, holding the unlighted and overflowing pipe in his hands absently, and then went on:

“Lewis, when a man holds an office such as mine is he has to do a lot of things he hates mightily to do. Now you take old Press Harper’s case. I reckin there never was a braver soldier anywhere than Press was. Do you remember Brice’s Crossroads?”

“Yes,” said the old doctor, his eyes suddenly afire. “Yes, Billy – and Vicksburg too.”

“Ah-hah!” went on the old judge – “and the second day’s fight at Chickamauga, when we lost so many out of the regiment, and Press came back out of the last charge, draggin’ little Gil Nicholas by the arms, and both of them purty nigh shot to pieces? Yes, suh; Press always was a fighter when there was any fightin’ to do – and the fightin’ was specially good in them days. The trouble with Press was he didn’t quit fightin’ when the rest of us did. Maybe it sort of got into his blood. It does do jest that sometimes, I judge.”

“Yes,” said Doctor Lake, “I suppose you’re right; but old Press is in a fair way to be cured now. A man with his temper ought never to touch whisky anyhow.”

“You’re right,” agreed the judge. “It’s a dangerous thing, licker is – and a curse to some people. I’d like to have a dram right this minute. Lew, I wish mightily you’d come on and go home with me tonight and take supper. I’ll send my nigger boy Jeff up to your house to tell your folks you won’t be there until late, and you walk on out to my place with me. I feel sort of played out and lonesome – I do so. Come on now. We’ll have a young chicken and a bait of hot waffles – I reckin that old nigger cook of mine does make the best waffles in the created world. After supper we’ll set a spell together and talk over them old times when we were in the army – and maybe we can kind of forget some of the things that’ve come up later.”

The noon accommodation would carry the delegation from Gideon K. Irons Camp over the branch line to the Junction, where it would connect with a special headed through for the reunion city. For the private use of the Camp the railroad company provided a car which the ladies of the town decorated on the night before with draped strips of red and white bunting down the sides, and little battle-flags nailed up over the two doors. The rush of the wind would soon whip away the little crossed flags from their tack fastenings end roll the bunting streamers up into the semblance of peppermint sticks; but the car, hitched to the tail end of the accommodation and surrounded by admiring groups of barelegged small boys, made a brave enough show when its intended passengers came marching down a good half hour ahead of leaving-time.

Considering the wide swath which death and the infirmities of age had been cutting in the ranks all these years, the Camp was sending a good representation – Judge Priest, the commandant; and Doctor Lake; and Major Joe Sam Covington; and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, who never missed a reunion; and Corporal Jake Smedley, the color-bearer, with the Camp’s flag furled on its staff and borne under his arm; and Captain Shelby Woodward – and four or five more. There was even one avowed private. Also, and not to be overlooked on any account, there was Uncle Zach Matthews, an ink-black, wrinkled person, with a shiny bald head polished like old rosewood, and a pair of warped legs bent outward like saddlebows. Personally Uncle Zach was of an open mind regarding the merits and the outcome of the Big War. As he himself often put it:

“Yas, suh – I ain’t got no set prejudices ary way. In de spring of ‘61 I went out wid my own w’ite folks, as body-sarvant to my young marster, Cap’n Harry Matthews – and we suttinly did fight dem bluebellies up hill and down dale fer three endurin’ years or more; but in de campaignin’ round Nashville somewhars I got kind of disorganized and turn’t round someway; and, when I sorter comes to myself, lo and behole, ef I ain’t been captured by de Fed’rul army! So, rather’n have any fussin’ ‘bout it, I j’ined in wid dem; and frum den on till de surrender I served on de other side – cookin’ fer one of their gin’els and doin’ odd jobs round de camp; but when ‘twas all over I come on back home and settled down ag’in ‘mongst my own folks, where I properly belonged. Den, yere a few years back, some of ‘em tum’t in and done some testifyin’ fer me so’s I could git my pension. Doctor Lake, he says to me hisse’f, he says; ‘Zach, bein’ as de Yankee Gover’mint is a passin’ out dis yere money so free you might jess as well have a little chunk of it too!’ And he – him and Mistah Charley Reed and some others, they helped me wid my papers; and, of course, I been mighty grateful to all dem gen’l’men ever since.”

So Uncle Zach drew his pension check quarterly, and regularly once a year went to the reunion as general factotum of the Camp, coming home laden with badges and heavy with small change. He and Judge Priest’s Jeff, who was of the second generation of freedom, now furnished a touch of intense color relief, sitting together in one of the rearmost seats, guarding the piled-up personal baggage of the veterans.

Shortly before train-time carriages came, bringing young Mrs. McLaurin, little Rita Covington and Miss Minnie Lyon – the matron of honor, the sponsor and the maid of honor respectively of the delegation. Other towns no larger would be sure to send a dozen or more sponsors and maids and matrons of honor; but the home Camp was proverbially moderate in this regard. As Captain Woodward had once said: “We are charmed and honored by the smiles of our womanhood, and we worship every lovely daughter of the South; but, at a reunion of veterans, somehow I do love to see a veteran interspersed here and there in among the fair sex.”

So now, as their special guests for this most auspicious occasion, they were taking along just these three – Rita Covington, a little eighteen-year-old beauty, and Minnie Lyon, a tall, fair, slender, pretty girl, and Mrs. Mc-Laurin. The two girls were in white linen, with touches of red at throat and waist; but young Mrs. McLaurin, who was a bride of two years’ standing and plump and handsome, looked doubly handsome and perhaps a wee mite plumper than common in a tailor-made suit of mouse-gray, that was all tricked out with brass buttons and gold-braided cuffs, and a wide black belt, with a cavalry buckle. That the inspired tailor who built this costume had put the stars of a major-general on the collar and the stripes of a corporal on the sleeve was a matter of no consequence whatsoever. The color was right, the fit of the coat was unflawed by a single wrinkle fore or aft, and the brass buttons poured like molten gold down the front. Originally young Mrs. McLaurin had intended to reserve her military suit for a crowning sartorial stroke on the day of the big parade; but at the last moment pride of possession triumphed over the whisperings of discretion, and so here she was now, trig and triumphant – though, if it must be confessed, a trifle closely laced in. Yet she found an immediate reward in the florid compliments of the old men. She radiated her satisfaction visibly as Doctor Lake and Captain Woodward ushered her and her two charges aboard the car with a ceremonious, Ivanhoeish deference, which had come down with them from their day to this, like the scent of old lavender lingering in ancient cedar chests.

A further martial touch was given by the gray coats of the old men, by the big Camp badges and bronze crosses proudly displayed by all, and finally by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, who, true to a habit of forty years’ standing, was wearing the rent and faded jacket that he brought home from the war, and carrying on his shoulder the ancient rusted musket that had served him from Sumter to the fall of Richmond.

The last of the party was on the decorated coach, the last ordinary traveler had boarded the single day-coach and the conductor was signaling for the start, when an erect old man, who all during the flurry of departure had been standing silent and alone behind the protecting shadow of the far side of the station, came swiftly across the platform, stepping with a high, noiseless, deerstalker’s tread, and, just as the engine bleated its farewell and the wheels began to turn, swung himself on the forward car. At sight of two little crossed flags fluttering almost above his head he lifted his slouch hat in a sort of shamed salute; but he kept his face turned resolutely away from those other old men to the rear of him. He cramped his great length down into a vacant seat in the daycoach, and there he sat, gazing straight ahead at nothing, as the train drew out of the station, bearing him to his two years at hard labor and these one-time comrades of his to their jubilating at the annual reunion.

As for the train, it went winding its leisurely and devious way down the branch line toward the Junction, stopping now and then at small country stations. The air that poured in through the open windows was sweet and heavy with Maytime odors of blossoming and blooming. In the tobacco patches the adolescent plants stood up, fresh and velvet-green. Mating red birds darted through every track-side tangle of underbrush and wove threads of living flame back and forth over every sluggish, yellow creek; and sparrowhawks teetered above the clearings, hunting early grasshoppers. Once in a while there was a small cotton-patch.

It was warm – almost as warm as a summer day. The two girls fanned themselves with their handkerchiefs and constantly brushed cinders off their starched blouses. Mrs. Mc-Laurin, buttoned in to her rounded throat, sat bolt-upright, the better to keep wrinkles from marring the flawless fit of her regimentals. She suffered like a Christian martyr of old, smiling with a sweet content – as those same Christian martyrs are said to have suffered and smiled. Judge Priest, sitting one seat to the rear of her, with Major Covington alongside him, napped lightly with his head against the hot red plush of the seat-back. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby found the time fitting and the audience receptive to his celebrated and more than familiar story of what on a certain history-making occasion he heard General Breckinridge say to General Buckner, and what General Buckner said to General Breckinridge in reply.

In an hour or so they began to draw out of the lowlands fructifying in the sunlight, and in among the craggy foothills. Here the knobs stood up, like the knuckle-bones of a great rough hand laid across the peaceful countryside. “Deadenings” flashed by, with the girdled, bleached tree-trunks rising, deformed and gaunt, above the young corn. The purplish pink of the redbud trees was thick in clumps on the hillsides. The train entered a cut with a steep fill running down on one side and a seamed cliff standing close up on the other. Small saplings grew out of the crannies in the rocks and swung their boughs downward so that the leaves almost brushed the dusty tops of the coaches sliding by beneath them.

Suddenly, midway of this cut, there came a grinding and sliding of the wheels – the cars began creaking in all their joints as though they would rack apart; and, with a jerk which wakened Judge Priest and shook the others in their seats, the train halted. From up ahead somewhere, heard dimly through the escape of the freed steam, came a confusion of shouted cries. Could they be nearing the Junction so soon? Mrs. McLaurin felt in a new handbag – of gray broadcloth with a gold clasp, to match her uniform – for a powder-rag. Then she shrank cowering back in her place, for leaping briskly up the car steps there appeared, framed in the open doorway just beyond her, an armed man – a short, broad man in a flannel shirt and ragged overalls, with a dirty white handkerchief bound closely over the bridge of his nose and shielding the lower part of his face. A long-barreled pistol was in his right hand and a pair of darting, evilly disposed eyes looked into her startled ones from under the brim of a broken hat.

“Hands up, everybody!” he called out, and swung his gun right and left from his hip, so that its muzzle seemed to point all ways at once. “Hands up, everybody – and keep ‘em up!”

Behind this man, back to back with him, was the figure of another man, somewhat taller, holding similar armed dominion over the astounded occupants of the day-coach. This much, and this much only, in a flash of time was seen by Uncle Zach Matthews and Judge Priest’s Jeff, as, animated by a joint instantaneous impulse, they slid off their seat at the other end of the car and lay embraced on the floor, occupying a space you would not have believed could have contained one darky – let alone two. And it was seen more fully and at greater length by the gray veterans as their arms with one accord rose stiffly above the level of their heads; and also it was seen by the young matron, the sponsor and the maid of honor, as they huddled together, clinging to one another desperately for the poor comfort of close contact. Little Rita Covington, white and still, looked up with blazing gray eyes into the face of the short man with the pistol. She had the palms of both her hands pressed tightly against her ears. Rita was brave enough – but she hated the sound of firearms. Where she half knelt, half crouched, she was almost under the elbow of the intruder.

The whole thing was incredible – it was impossible! Train robberies had passed out of fashion years and years before. Here was this drowsing, quiet country lying just outside the windows, and the populous Junction only a handful of miles away; but, incredible or not, there stood the armed trampish menace in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder with an accomplice. And from outside and beyond there came added evidence to the unbelievable truth of it in the shape of hoarse, unintelligible commands rising above a mingling of pointless outcries and screams.

“Is this a joke, sir, or what?” demanded Major Covington, choking with an anger born of his own helplessness and the undignifiedness of his attitude.

“Old gent, if you think it’s a joke jest let me ketch you lowerin’ them arms of yourn,” answered back the yeggman. His words sounded husky, coming muffled through the handkerchief; but there was a grim threat in them, and for just a breathless instant the pistol-barrel stopped wavering and centered dead upon the major’s white-vested breast.

“Set right still, major,” counseled Judge Priest at his side, not firing his eyes off the muffled face. “He’s got the drop on us.”

“But to surrender without a blow – and we all old soldiers too!” lamented Major Covington, yet making no move to lower his arms.

“I know – but set still,” warned Judge Priest, his puckered glance taking toll sideways of his fellow travelers – all of them with chagrin, amazement and indignation writ large upon their faces, and all with arms up and palms opened outward like a calisthenic class of elderly gray beards frozen stiff and solid in the midst of some lung-expanding exercise. Any other time the picture would have been funny; but now it wasn’t. And the hold-up man was giving his further orders.

“This ain’t no joke and it ain’t no time for foolin’. I gotter work fast and you all gotter keep still, or somebody’ll git crippled up bad!”

With his free hand he pulled off his broken derby, revealing matted red hair, with a dirty bald spot in the front. He held the hat in front of him, crown down.

“I’m goin’ to pass through this car,” he announced, “and I want everybody to contribute freely. You gents will lower one hand at a time and git yore pokes and kettles – watches and wallets – out of yore clothes. And remember, no monkey business – no goin’ back to yore hip pockets – unless you wanter git bored with this!” he warned; and he followed up the warning with a nasty word which borrowed an added nastiness coming through his rag mask.

His glance flashed to the right, taking in the quivering figures of the two girls and the young woman. “Loidies will contribute too,” he added.

“Oh!” gasped Mrs. McLaurin miserably; and mechanically her right hand went across to protect the slender diamond bracelet on her left wrist; while tall Miss Lyon, crumpled and trembling, pressed herself still farther against the side of the car, and Rita Covington involuntarily clutched the front of her blouse, her fingers closing over the little chamois-skin bag that hung hidden there, suspended by a ribbon about her throat. Rita was an only daughter and a pampered one; her father was the wealthiest man in town and she owned handsomer jewels than an eighteen-year-old girl commonly possesses. The thief caught the meaning of those gestures and his red-rimmed eyes were greedy.

“You dog, you!” snorted old Doctor Lake; and he, like the major, sputtered in the impotence of his rage. “You’re not going to rob these ladies too?”

“I’m a-goin’ to rob these loidies too,” mimicked the thief. “And you, old gent, you’d better cut out the rough talk.” Without turning his head, and with his pistol making shifting fast plays to hold the car in subjection, he called back: “Slim, there’s richer pickin’ here than we expected. If you can leave them rubes come help me clean up.”

“Just a second,” was the answer from behind him, “till I git this bunch hypnotized good.”

“Now then,” called the red-haired man, swearing vilely to emphasize his meaning, “as I said before, cough up! Loidies first – you!” And he motioned with his pistol toward Mrs. McLaurin and poked his hat out at her. Her trembling fingers fumbled at the clasp of her bracelet a moment and the slim band fell flashing into the hat.

“You are no gentleman – so there!” quavered the unhappy lady, as a small, gemmed watch with a clasp, and a silver purse, followed the bracelet. Bessie Lyon shrank farther and farther away from him, with sobbing intakes of her breath. She was stricken mute and helpless with fear.

“Now then,” the red-haired man was addressing Rita, “you next. Them purties you’ve got hid there inside yore shirt – I’ll trouble you for them! Quick now!” he snarled, seeing that she hesitated. “Git ‘em out!”

“I ca-n’t,” she faltered, and her cheeks reddened through their dead pallor; “my waist – buttons – behind. I can’t and I won’t.”

The thief shifted his derby hat from his left hand to his right, holding it fast with his little finger hooked under the brim, while the other fingers kept the cocked revolver poised and ready.

“I’ll help you,” he said; and as the girl tried to dodge away from him he shoved a stubby finger under the collar of her blouse and with a hard jerk ripped the lace away, leaving her white neck half bare. At her cry and the sound of the tearing lace her father forgot the threat of the gunbarrel – forgot everything.

“You vile hound!” he panted. “Keep your filthy hand off of my daughter!” And up he came out of his seat. And old Judge Priest came with him, and both of them lunged forward over the seatback at the ruffian, three feet away.

So many things began to happen then, practically all simultaneously, that never were any of the active participants able to recall exactly just what did happen and the order of the happening. It stood out afterward, though, from a jumble of confused recollections, that young Mrs. McLaurin screamed and fainted; that Bessie Lyon fainted quietly without screaming; and that little Rita Covington neither fainted nor screamed, but snatched outward with a lightning quick slap of her hand at the fist of the thief which held the pistol, so that the bullet, exploding out of it with a jet of smoke, struck in the aisle instead of striking her father or Judge Priest. It was this bullet, the first and only one fired in the whole mix-up, that went slithering diagonally along the car floor, guttering out a hole like a worm-track in the wood and kicking up splinters right in the face of Unde Zach Matthews and Judge Priest’s Jeff as they lay lapped in tight embrace, so that they instantly separated and rose, like a brace of flushed blackbirds, to the top of the seat in front. From that point of vantage, with eyes popped and showing white all the way round, they witnessed what followed in the attitude of quiveringly interested onlookers.

All in an instant they saw Major Covington and Judge Priest struggling awkwardly with the thief over the intervening seatback, pawing at him, trying to wrest his hot weapon away from him; saw Mrs. McLaurin’s head roll back inertly; saw the other hold-up man pivot about to come to his bleaguered partner’s aid; and saw, filling the doorway behind this second ruffian, the long shape of old man Press Harper, as he threw himself across the joined platforms upon their rear, noiseless as a snake and deadly as one, his lean old face set in a square shape of rage, his hot red hair erect on his head like a Shawnee’s scalplock, his gaunt, long arms upraised and arched over and his big hands spread like grapples. And in that same second the whole aisle seemed filled with gray-coated, gray-haired old men, falling over each other and impeding each other’s movements in their scrambling forward surge to take a hand in the fight.

To the end of their born days those two watching darkies had a story to tell that never lost its savor for teller or for audience – a story of how a lank, masked thief was taken by surprise from behind; was choked, crushed, beaten into instant helplessness before he had a chance to aim and fire; then was plucked backward, lifted high in the arms of a man twice his age and flung sidelong, his limbs flying like a whirligig as he rolled twenty feet down the steep slope to the foot of the fill. But this much was only the start of what Uncle Zach and Judge Priest’s Jeff had to tell afterward.

For now, then, realizing that an attack was being made on his rear, the stockier thief broke Judge Priest’s fumbling grip upon his gun-hand and half swung himself about to shoot the unseen foe, whoever it might be; but, as he jammed its muzzle into the stomach of the newcomer and pressed the trigger, the left hand of old Harper closed down fast upon the lock of the revolver, so that the hammer, coming down, only pinched viciously into his horny thumb. Breast to breast they wrestled in that narrow space at the head of the aisle for possession of the weapon. The handkerchief mask had fallen away, showing brutal jaws covered with a red stubble, and loose lips snarled away from the short stained teeth. The beleaguered robber, young, stocky and stout, cursed and mouthed blasphemies; but the old man was silent except for his snorted breathing and his frame was distended and swollen with a terrible Berserker lust of battle.

While Major Covington and Judge Priest and the foremost of the others got in one another’s way and packed in a solid, heaving mass behind the pair, all shouting and all trying to help, but really not helping at all, the red ruffian, grunting with the fervor of the blow, drove his clenched fist into old Harper’s face, ripping the skin on the high Indian cheekbone. The old man dealt no blows in return, but his right hand found a grip in the folds of flesh at the tramp’s throat and the fingers closed down like iron clamps on his wind.

There is no telling how long a man of Harper’s age and past habits might have maintained the crushing strength of that hold, even though rage had given him the vigor of bygone youth; but the red-stubbled man, gurgling and wriggling to be free, began to die of suffocation before the grip weakened. To save himself he let go of the gunbutt, and the gun fell and bounced out of sight under a seat. Bearing down with both hands and all his might and weight upon Harper’s right wrist, he tore the other’s clasp off his throat and staggered back, drawing the breath with sobbing sounds back into his bursting lungs. He would have got away then if he could, and he turned as though to flee the length of the car and escape by the rear door.

The way was barred, by whooping, panting old men, hornet-hot. Everybody took a hand or tried to. The color-bearer shoved the staff of the flag between his legs and half tripped him, and as he regained his feet Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, jumping on a seat to get at him over the bobbing heads of his comrades, dealt him a glancing, clumsy blow on the shoulder with the muzzle of his old musket. Major Covington and Judge Priest were still right on him, bearing their not inconsiderable bulk down upon his shoulders.

He could have fought a path through these hampering forces. Wrestling and striking out, he half shoved, half threw them aside; but there was no evading the gaunt old man who bore down on him from the other direction. The look on the face of the old warlock daunted him. He yelled just once, a wordless howl of fear and desperation, and the yell was smothered back into his throat as Harper coiled down on him like a python, fettering with his long arms the shorter, thicker arms of the thief, crushing his ribs in, smothering him, killing him with a frightful tightening pressure. Locked fast in Harper’s embrace, he went down on his back underneath; and now – all this taking place much faster than it has taken me to write it or you to read it – the old man reared himself up. He put his booted foot squarely on the contorted face of the yeggman and twisted the heel brutally, like a man crushing a worm, and mashed the thief’s face to pulp. Then he seized him by the collar of his shirt, dragged him like so much carrion back the length of the car, the others making a way for him, and, with a last mighty heave, tossed him off the rear platform and stood watching him as he flopped and rolled slackly down the steep grade of the right-of-way to the gully at the bottom.

All this young Jeff and Uncle Zach witnessed, and at the last they began cheering. As they cheered there was a whistle of the air and the cars began to move – slowly at first, with hard jerks on the couplings; and then smoother and faster as the wheels took hold on the rails’, and the track-joints began to click-clack in regular rhythm. And, as the train slid away, those forward who mustered up the hardihood to peer out of the windows saw one man – a red-haired, half-bald one – wriggling feebly at the foot of the cut, and another one struggling to his feet uncertainly, meanwhile holding his hands to his stunned head; and, still farther along, a third, who fled nimbly up the bank and into the undergrowth beyond, without a backward glance. Seemingly, all told, there had been only three men concerned in the abortive holdup.

Throughout its short length the train sizzled with excitement and rang with the cries of some to go on and of others to go back and make prisoners of the two crippled yeggs; but the conductor, like a wise conductor, signaled the engineer to make all speed ahead, being glad enough to have saved his train and his passengers whole. On his way through to take an inventory of possible damage and to ascertain the cause of things, he was delayed in the day-coach by the necessity of calming a hysterical country woman, so he missed the best part of what was beginning to start in the decorated rear coach.

There Mrs. McLaurin and tall Miss Lyon were emerging from their fainting fits, and little Rita Covington, now that the danger was over and past, wept in a protecting crook of her father’s arm. Judge Priest’s Jeff was salvaging a big revolver, with one chamber fired, from under a seat. Eight or nine old men were surrounding old Press Harper, all talking at once, and all striving to pat him on the bade with clumsy, caressing slaps. And out on the rear platform, side by side, stood Sergeant Jimmy Bagby and Corporal Jake Smedley; the corporal was wildly waving his silk flag, now unfurled to show the blue St. Andrew’s cross, white-starred on a red background, waving it first up and down and then back and forth with all the strength of his arms, until the silk square popped and whistled in the air of the rushing train; the sergeant was going through the motions of loading and aiming and firing his ancient rusted musket. And at each imaginary discharge both of them, in a cracked duet, cheered for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy!