“I’m glad. Get up now, and let’s be friends. Won’t you share my seat? Or—perhaps, under the circumstances, you’ll feel more comfortable to stand up for a while.”
CHAPTER X
SERGEANT DADD
A SEA of pale-green sward, bathed in a drift of pink-white apple-blossoms. Above, the softest of blue spring skies.
In the middle distance the hazy mountains brave in their spring panoply. And, between mountains and apple-orchard, a line of trampled grain-fields, sown now with hundreds of sprawling dead men in dark blue and in light gray.
Back of the glowing white orchard a dingy white city that had sprung to life overnight. A city of many long streets, each lined with battered canvas tents.
Over one of these tents—a tent large and less dingy than its humbler fellows—floated an American flag topped by a gilded eagle. The veriest three-month recruit would have known the tent by its insignia as the temporary abode of the general commanding.
Through the opening made by the pinned-back flap the interior was visible. At the back was a cot; beside it a shabby campaign trunk.
In the tent’s center was a collapsible table, at which, on a campaign stool, sat a bearded man in a gold-laced blue coat which bore the rank mark of a general officer of the Union army.
At attention in front of the general stood a tall, wiry man, bronzed of face, his grizzled hair close clipped, his eye the eye of a boy. Sergeant’s stripes adorned the arm of his fatigue jacket.
Few of the old Eagle Hotel coterie back in Ideala would have recognized at a glance, in the trim, alert figure, their old crony, the portly and shambling Dad.