"How duz I know you uns ain't Yankees? I hearn thar wuz a right smart heap o' Yankee sojers not fur off'n hereabouts."
At this moment Sairey fortunately returned. She brought in her brown hand an old glass goblet, without a standard, but filled to the brim with a foaming mixture that looked like delicious milk. Alas! Tom, who loathed buttermilk, was now to learn that in the hills "milk" meant "buttermilk." He should have asked for "sweet milk." Sairey handed him the goblet with a shy grace, blushing a little as the boy's hand touched hers. He lifted it eagerly to his thirsty lips, took a long draught, and sputtered and gagged. But the mistake was in his asking and the girl had gone a hundred yards to get him what she thought he wanted. He was a boy, but he was a gentleman. He swallowed the nauseous stuff to the last drop, and made his best bow as he thanked her. Suddenly the old woman said to him:
"Where wuz you born, bub?"
"New—New——" stammered Tom. His tongue did not lend itself readily to a lie, even in his country's cause. When he was still too young to understand what the words meant, his mother had told him: "A lie soils a boy's mouth." As he grew older, she had dinned that big truth into his small mind. Now, taken by surprise, the habit of his young life asserted itself and the tell-tale truth that he had been born in New York was on his unsoiled lips, when Andrews finished the sentence for him.
"New Orleans," said Andrews, coolly.
"He don't talk that-a-way," grumbled the old beldam.
"He was raised up No'th," Andrews explained, "but soon as this yer onpleasantness began, he cum Souf to fight for we-uns."
Andrews had overdone his dialect.
"Sairey," commanded the old woman, "put up the flag."