Dad saluted with the sword he had drawn and turned to go. Hooker recalled him as he reached the threshold of the tent door.
“Lieutenant Dadd,” he said inquisitively, “do you chance to have been at the Point?”
“No, sir. I am not a West Point man.”
“Were you ever an officer in the army?”
“You will not find the name, ‘James Dadd,’ on any army list, I am afraid, sir,” answered the new-made lieutenant, shaking inwardly.
“H’m!” mused Hooker. “Probably not. Probably not. It’s no affair of mine or of anyone’s. But don’t deny it too strenuously to other people who may ask you—or, rather, if you don’t want them to ask you, don’t draw a sword and salute with it as if you had handled such weapons for years.
“Infantry privates do not carry swords. And when they are first promoted, they don’t handle them as you do. That is all. Good-by, Lieutenant—Dadd.”
CHAPTER XVI
THE CHICKAHOMINY
A BOGGY, tree-strewn stretch of lowlands where whitish mists hung thick at dawn and whence miasma vapors rose under the broiling sun of midday.
A delightful place for duck and quail shooting in midwinter. In summer a rank plague spot—and incidentally, on this particular summer of 1862, the camping ground of the army of the Potomac. The malarial region whose name, even to-day, sends a shudder along the bent spine of many an oldster.