His mother laid her knitting in her lap and gazed over her spectacles into the concave vault of the sky, so vast as seen from the vantage ground of the little log cabin on the mountain’s brow. Bending to the dark, wooded ranges encircling the horizon, it seemed of a crystalline transparency and of wonderful gradations of color. The broad blue stretches overhead merged into a delicate green of exquisite purity, and thence issued a suffusion of the faintest saffron in which flakes of orange burned like living fire. A jutting spur intercepted the sight of the sinking sun, and with its dazzling disk thus screened, upon the brilliant west might be descried the familiar microscopic angle speeding toward the south. A vague clamor floated downward.
“Them fowels, sure enough!” she said. “Sence I war a gal I hev knowed ’em by thar flyin’ always in that thar peaked p’int.”
“They keep thar alignment ez reg’lar,” said her son suddenly, “jes’ like we-uns hev ter do in the army. They hev actially got thar markers. Look at ’em dress thar ranks! An’ thar’s even a sergeant-major standin’ out ez stiff an’ percise—see him! Thar! Column forward! Guide left! March!” he cried delightedly.
“I ’lowed, Hilary, ez ye bed in an’ about bed enough o’ the army,” said the guest, bluntly.
Hilary’s face changed. But for some such reminder he sometimes forgot that missing right hand. He made no answer, his moody eyes fastened on that aërial marshaling along the vast plain of the sunset. His right arm was gone, and the stump dangled helplessly with its superfluity of brown jeans sleeve bound about it.
“Now that air a true word!” exclaimed Mrs. Knox, “only Hil’ry won’t hev it so. I ’lows ter him ez he los’ his arm through jinin’ the Confed’ army, an’ he ’lows ’twar gittin’ in a fight with one o’ his own comrades.”
Jonas Scruggs glanced keenly at her from under his bushy, grizzled eyebrows, his lips solemnly puckered, and his stubbly pointed chin resting on his knotty hands, which were clasped upon his stout stick. He had the dispassionate, pondering aspect of an umpire, which seemed to invite the cheerful submission of differences.
“Ye knows I war fur the Union, an’ so war his dad,” she continued. “My old man had been ailin’ ennyhows, but this hyar talk o’ bustin’ up the Union—why, it jes’ fairly harried him inter his grave. An’ I ’lowed ez Hil’ry would be fur the Union, too, like everybody in the mountings ez hed good sense. But when a critter-company o’ Confeds rid up the mounting one day Hil’ry he talked with some of ’em, an’ he war stubborn ever after. An’ so he jined the critter-company.”