A stray American soldier, here and there, had taken him for a deserter and, out of pity, had looked the other way. The war was practically at an end. They saw no reason for dragging back to punishment a man who seemed so anxious to get home; nor to report seeing him.
At last the numbness lifted, bit by bit, from Brinton’s mind. And he knew it had not been the numbness of drink, but of shock.
He came to his senses to find himself repeating mechanically, for the thousandth time:
“Dishonorably—dismissed—from the service you have—disgraced!”
The odd repetition of the prefix “dis” in the three pregnant words of the sentence stood out in his memory. He could shut his eyes and see Scott’s rage-bloated face, as the general had flung the phrase at him.
“Dishonorably dismissed from the service you have disgraced!”
That was it. And the torn-off epaulets had dangled from Scott’s gnarled fists as the sentence was spoken. “Dishonorably dismissed!”
Brinton, like a child who bites on a sore tooth, fell to recalling his own father—veteran of the war of 1812.
The grandfather whom he dimly remembered as a bent, withered giant—the once herculean captain who at the battle of Saratoga had with a single backhand stroke of his cavalry saber sliced off the head of a British dragoon.
At home hung the musket—the “Queen’s Arm” gun—that his great-grandfather had carried in the French and Indian War, and later, as a very old man, at Concord and Lexington.