For the talk was on war—the time was the summer of 1861—and the Civil War had already entered bloodily upon the first of its four years.
One company, three months earlier, had marched gayly forth from Ideala upon the calcium path of patriotism—to be shot to atoms in the first battle of Manassas. And now a second and a third were forming.
“Yes,” a crippled oldster was declaring from the far end of the bar, his words percolating ludicrously through a double set of misfit teeth, “yes, gentlemen, Uncle Sam will find he’s in for a good long siege of it before he’s done. He thought he’d have Jeff Davis licked to a standstill in three months. Well, the three months are up. And, so far, it’s been Uncle Jeff that’s done all the licking. I tell you, this war’s going to last out the year and maybe part of next.”
Dad, through his mildly rubicund nose, made a weird sound, variously and incorrectly expressed in print as “H-m!” or “Humph!” It was a sound as derisive as it was wordless.
The misfit-teeth man glowered at him.
“Well,” he drawled, “I take it, Dad, that you don’t agree with me. You generally don’t. But that don’t make it any the less true.”
“No, Mr. Stage,” returned Dad, “I don’t. This war will be wound up inside of another three months at longest. When the fighting spirit of the North is once aroused—when this glorious Union, one and indissoluble, once sets its foot down; the Confederacy will collapse like a pricked toy balloon. You must grant me credence, when I prophesy this. I know the United States and I know war.”
“Let me see,” mused Stage, scratching his chin in deep reflection. “Let me see—you do know war, don’t you, now? I seem to remember you were in our little unpleasantness down in Mexico, some years back. And speaking of wars, I wonder you don’t enlist. You’re still a hearty man. And the North needs men. Why not go to the front again?”
Dad’s face flushed so hotly that his nose actually paled by contrast.
“I—I am forced to remain at home for business reasons,” he said, coldly. “Otherwise—”