The Colonel was an exotic. Perverse fates had transplanted him into a strange clime. All that anybody along the river knew of his history, up to the time of his arrival, had come from his own lips, and none of it was to his discredit.
I had made his acquaintance at Posey’s store, where he frequently came for supplies. Muskrat Hyatt cautioned me not to have anything to do with him.
“That feller’s bad medicine,” he declared. “He’s worse’n I am, an’ that’s sayin’ a whole lot. If you ever go down to his place, you keep yer cash in yer shoes an’ don’t you take ’em off while you’re there.”
The little farm, with its dilapidated house and barn, had come to the Colonel as an inheritance from a distant relative whom he had never seen. The old pioneer, who had died there, had spent years of toil, patient and unremitting, in clearing the land and coaxing a precarious livelihood from the reluctant soil. He had left no will and the Colonel was the nearest surviving relative.
The Colonel explained that this “fahm” and a “small passel of land down south” was all that he now possessed in the world. The “iron heel of the oppressah” had destroyed everything else. His “beautiful mansion on the Cumbe’land,” and all his “niggahs,” had been lost in the fury of the conflict. His “pussonal fo’tune” was a wreck.
He was over seventy, and quite gray, but his erect military figure and splendid health somewhat belied his years. He was rather indolent in his movements, but as he sat in his hickory arm chair before the stone fire place, the lights that played over his storm beaten features pictured a warrior in repose.
His heavy moustache was trained down in horseshoe fashion on each side of his chin, and then twisted outward in a way that gave his face a redoubtable expression when he frowned. He would often stand before the three-cornered piece of mirror attached to the outside of the house, combing and recombing the bellicose ornament, and observing it attentively, until he achieved particular curves at the ends that pleased his fancy. Apparently he affected a formidable facial aspect, becoming to one who had led charging men.
Colonel Jasper M. Peets
Evidently he had somewhere received a fair education, but outside of fiction, a field he had widely covered, he seemed to have little interest in books. His former environment had left a romantic polish, heightened by a florid imagination. His character had been moulded by the traditions of the south and they were the only religion he had. His vanity was delightful, and he had the heart of a child. Little gifts of tobacco and cigars made him happy for hours, and there was a subtle lovable quality about him that radiated even in his foibles.