“Wait a minute,” he said, in evidently sincere anxiety not to be misunderstood, and picking his words slowly as he went along, “hold on—I’m not fooling! Please sit down again. I’ve got something important, and mighty queer, too, to say to you.”
The O’Mahony, with a grunt of reluctant acquiescing, sat down once more. The two men looked at each other with troubled glances, the one vaguely suspicious, the other still round-eyed with surprise.
“You ask who I am,” Bernard began. “I’ll tell you. I was a little shaver—oh, six or seven years old—just at the beginning of the War. My father enlisted when they began raising troops. The recruiting tent in our town was in the old hay-market by the canal bridge. It seems to me, now, that they must have kept my father there for weeks alter he ’d put his uniform on. I used to go there every day, I know, with my mother to see him. But there was another soldier there—this is the queer thing about a boy’s memory—I remember him ever so much better than I do my own father. It’s—let’s see—eighteen years now, but I’d know him to this day, wherever I met him. He carried a gun, and he walked all day long up and down in front of the tent, like a polar bear in his cage. We boys thought he was the most important man in the whole army. Some of them knew him—he belonged to our section originally, it seems—and they said he’d been in lots of wars before. I can see him now, as plainly as—as I see you. His name was Tisdale—Zeb, I think it was—no, Zeke Tisdale.”
Perhaps The O’Mahony changed color. He sat with his back to the window, and the ruddy glow from the peat blaze made it impossible to tell. But he did not take his sharp gray eye off Bernard’s face, and it never so much as winked.
“Very interesting,” he said, “but it doesn’t go very far toward explaining who you are. If I’m not mistaken, that was the question.”
“Me?” answered Bernard, “Oh, yes, I forgot that. Well, sir, I am the only surviving son of one Hugh O’Mahony, who was a shoemaker in Tecumseh, who served in the same regiment, perhaps the same company, with this Zeke Tisdale I’ve told you about, and who, after the War, moved out to Michigan where he died.”
An oppressive silence settled upon the room. The O’Mahony still looked his companion straight in the face, but it was with a lack-luster eye and with the effect of having lost the physical power to look elsewhere. He drummed with his fingers in a mechanical way on the arms of the chair, as he kept up this abstracted and meaningless gaze.
There fell suddenly upon this long-continued silence the reverberation of an exceptionally violent outburst of uproar from the square.
“Cheers for The O’Mahony!” came from one of the lustiest of the now well-lubricated throats; and then followed a scattering volley of wild hurroos and echoing yells.
As these died away, a shrill voice lifted itself, screaming: