"I won't be quiet!" he shouted, in his weak voice, hoarse from his long speech in the morning. "This is the man that got me to substitute for him and cheated me out of my thousand dollars. I won't be quiet!" He looked down at the slip of paper in his hand. Perhaps it was the ease with which Brant paid out such a vast sum that moved him, perhaps it was the uselessness of the thousand dollars, now that he was old. He tore the blue strip across and threw it on the floor. "There is your thousand dollars!"
He had never looked so wretchedly miserable as he did now. He was ragged and dusty, and the copious tears of age were running down his cheeks. His were not the only tears in the crowd. A member of his old post, which had repudiated him, seized him by the arm.
"Come with me, Daggett. We'll fix you up. We'll make it up to you, Daggett."
But Daggett jerked away.
"Get out. I'll fix myself up if there's any fixing."
He walked past Brant, not deigning to look at him, he stepped upon the fragments of paper on the floor, and shambled to the door. There he saw the faces of Jakie Barsinger and Bert Taylor and the other guides who had laughed at him, who had called him "Thousand-Dollar" Daggett, now gaping at him. Old Daggett's cheerfulness returned.
"You blame' fools couldn't earn a thousand dollars if you worked a thousand years. And I"—he waved a scornful hand over his shoulder—"I can throw a thousand dollars away."
VII
THE RETREAT
Grandfather Myers rose stiffly from his knees. He had been weeding Henrietta's nasturtium bed, which, thanks to him, was always the finest in the neighborhood of Gettysburg. As yet, the plants were not more than three inches high, and the old man tended them as carefully as though they were children. He was thankful now that his morning's work was done, the wood-box filled, the children escorted part of the way to school, and the nasturtium bed weeded, for he saw the buggy of the mail-carrier of Route 4 come slowly down the hill. It was grandfather's privilege to bring the mail in from the box. This time he reached it before the postman, and waited smilingly for him. It always reminded him a little of his youth, when the old stone house behind him had been a tavern, and the stage drew up before it each morning with flourish of horn and proud curveting of horses.
The postman waved something white at him as he approached.