The bishop was startled and secretly amused. He was used to being called “Father”—frequently his collar and vest deceived Romanists—but he couldn’t remember when anyone had addressed him as “son.”
“Good evening, sir,” he answered.
“Son,” quavered the other—he must be all of ninety, the bishop decided—“say, son, I heared you back thar—part of whut you said. You done fust-rate—yep, fust-rate, fur a Yankee. You air a Yankee, ain’t you?”
“Well, I was born in Nebraska, but I live now in Minnesota,” said the bishop.
“That so? Well, I’m an Alabama boy!”
All at once the bishop ceased to be amused. As the talon released its fumbling hold on him and the remnant tottered away, the bishop’s right arm came up smartly but involuntarily in a military salute.
“He calls himself a boy!” quoth the bishop, addressing no one in particular. “I know now why they fought four years against such odds!”
Suddenly he was prouder than ever of being an American. And he, a stranger to these parts, felt the pathos of it all—the pathos of age and decrepitude, the pathos of the thronging shadows of an heroic Lost Cause, the gallant pathos of these defeated men who even now at their time of life would never admit they had been defeated—these things, thrown out in relief against this screen of blaring brass and pretty young girls and socially ambitious mothers and general hullabaloo.
But this story, such as it is, is not concerned with this particular reunion so much as it is concerned with the reactions to the reunion of one surviving Confederate who attended it. He was not an imported orator nor a thwarted deliverer of historical reports, nor yet the commander of some phantom division whose main camp ground now was a cemetery. He was still what he had been back yonder in ’65—a high private of the rear rank. He was fond of saying so. With him it was one favorite little joke which never staled.
He was a very weary high private as he trudged along. An exceedingly young and sleepy Boy Scout was his guide, striving to keep in stride with him. First the old man would tote his small valise, then the Scout would take it over for a spell.