“We want to find out if the Board of Supervisors can appropriate money to send our Confederate veterans to the Reunion in June. There have been so many unusual expenses, bridges washed away and that smallpox quarantine, that funds are low. I hope they can raise the requisite amount.�
“Of course they will. They must,� Mrs. Osborne said quickly and positively. “Why, the yearly reunion—seeing old comrades, being heroized, recalling the glorious past—is the one bright spot in their gray old lives.�
“Mr. Tavis and Cap’n Anderson were talking about the Reunion at the post office yesterday,� said Dick. “They are just crazy about having it in Washington. Cap’n has never been there. But he was telling how near he and old Jube Early came to it, in ’64.�
“What an experience it will be, taking peaceful possession in old age of the Capital they campaigned against when they were soldier boys, over fifty years ago!� said Mrs. Osborne. “Certainly they must go. How many are there, Mayo?�
“Nine in our district,� answered her husband. “Last year there were sixteen. Three have died, and four are bedridden.�
“Ah! so few are left; so many have passed on.� Mrs. Osborne glanced through the open door at a portrait, her father in a colonel’s gray uniform. “Of course they must go, our nine old soldiers.�
“Sure!� said Dick. “If there isn’t money enough, we boys can help raise it. Mr. Tavis says he’ll pay me to plant corn, afternoons and Saturdays. I wasn’t thinking about doing it. But our old Confeds mustn’t miss their Reunion.�
“Good boy! that’s the right spirit,� exclaimed Mrs. Osborne.
She adored the memory of her gallant father and of the Confederate cause to which he had devoted himself. The quiet, uneventful years had brought no new deep, inspiring interests to the little Southern community. Its love and loyalty clung to the past. To the children the Lost Cause was a tradition as heroic and romantic as the legends of Roland and Arthur; but it was a tradition linked to reality by the old gray-clad men who had fought with Lee and Jackson. As Jones and Tavis and Walthall, they were ordinary old men, rather tiresome and absurd; but call them “Confederate veterans� and they were transformed to heroes whom it was an honor to serve. Dick, shirking the work that meant food for his family, would toil gladly to send them to their Reunion.
“They must have this, perhaps their last—�