Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly broken him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic silence, almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough still to get angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man; we felt by instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this terrible month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it, in a rage with everything and everybody.
“If there’s any justice in the land,” put in Si Hummaston, “you’d ought to get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn’t wonder if you could, too, if you sued ’em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours.”
“Why, the man’s a fool!” burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with a snort. “I don’t want the hundred dollars—I wouldn’t’a’ begrudged a thousand—if only they’d dealt honestly by me. I paid ’em their own figure, without beatin’ ’em down a penny. If it’d be’n double, I’d ’a’ paid it. What I wanted was my boy! It ain’t so much their cheatin’ me I mind, either, if it ’d be’n about anything else. But to think of Alvy—my boy—after all the trouble I took, an’ the journey, an’ my sickness there among strangers—to think that after it all he’s buried down there, no one knows where, p’raps in some trench with private soldiers, shovelled in anyhow—oh-h! they ought to be hung!”
The two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; Aunt Em lifted her head at this.
“If a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in,” she said, vehemently, “it’s good enough for the best man in the army. On Resurrection Day, do you think them with shoulder-straps ’ll be called fust an’ given all the front places? I reckon the men that carried a musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore swords. They gave their lives as much as the others did, an’ the best man that ever stepped couldn’t do no more.”
Old Arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise and some elements of menace. Reflection seemed, however, to make him think better of an attack on Aunt Em. He went on, instead, with rambling exclamations to his auditors at large.
“Makin’ me the butt of the whole county!” he cried. “There was that funeral to-day—with a parade an’ a choir of music an’ so on: an’ now it’ll come out in the papers that it wasn’t Alvy at all I brought back with me, but only some perfect stranger—by what you can make out from his clothes, not even an officer at all. I tell you the war’s a jedgment on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin’ an’ robbin’ of honest men! They wa’n’t no sense in that battle at Cold Harbor anyway—everybody admits that! It was murder an’ massacre in cold blood—fifty thousand men mowed down, an’ nothin’ gained by it! An’ then not even to git my boy’s dead body back! I say hangin’s too good for ’em!”
“Yes, father,” said Myron, soothingly; “but do you stick to what you said about the—the box? Wouldn’t it look better—”
“No!” shouted Arphaxed, with emphasis. “Let Dana do what I told him—take it down this very night to the poor-master, an’ let him bury it where he likes. It’s no affair of mine. I wash my hands of it. There won’t be no funeral held here!”
It was then that Serena spoke. Strangely enough, old Arphaxed had not seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped as he beheld her now standing before him. He made a gesture signifying his disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have spoken, but she held up her hand.