General Meriwether Grider has been dead this many a year now. He gave his life for the women and the children when the Belle of the Bends burned up at Cottonwood Bar; and that horror befell so long ago that the present generation down our way knows it only as a thing of which those garrulous and tiresome creatures, the older inhabitants, are sometimes moved to speak. But the rules for the regulation and conduct of subsequent banquets which were adopted on that long-ago night, when the general sat at the head of the table, hold good, even though all else in our town has changed.
Of the ardent and youthful sixty-odd who dined with him then, a fading and aging and sorely diminished handful is left. Some in the restless boom days of the eighties moved away to other and brisker communities, and some have marched down the long, lone road that leads to a far country. Yet it abides as a bylaw and a precedent that only orthodox members of the original company shall have covers and places provided for them when anniversary night rolls round. The Richland House—always—must be the place of dining; this, too, in spite of the fact that the Richland House has been gnawed by the tooth of time into a shabby old shell, hardly worthy to be named in the same printed page with the smart Hotel Moderne—strictly European plan; rates, three dollars a day and upward—which now figures as our leading hotel.
Near the conclusion of the feast, when the cloth has been cleared of the dishes and only the glasses are left, the rolls called by the acting top-sergeant—cholera having taken off the real top-sergeant in '75. Those who are present answer for themselves, and for those who are absent some other voice answers. And then at the very last, after the story-telling is done, they all stand and drink to Company B—its men, its memories, its most honourable record, and its most honourable dead.
They tell me that this last May just seven met on the evening of the twelfth to sit beneath the crossed battle-flags in the Richland House dining room, and that everything was over and done with long before eleven o'clock. But the annual dinner which I especially have in mind to describe here took place on a somewhat more remote twelfth of May, when Company B still might muster better than the strength of a corporal's guard. If I remember correctly, eighteen grizzled survivors were known to be alive that year.
In saying that, though, I would not have you infer that there were no more than eighteen veterans in our town. Why, in those times there must have been two hundred easily. Gideon K. Irons Camp could turn out upward of a hundred members in good standing for any large public occasion; but you understand this was a dinner limited to Company B alone, which restriction barred out a lot of otherwise highly desirable individuals.
It barred out Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, for the sergeant had served with King's Hellhounds; and Captain Shelby Woodward, who belonged to the Orphan Brigade, as you would have learned for yourself at first hand had you ever enjoyed as much as five minutes of uninterrupted conversation with the captain; and Mr. Wolfe Hawley, our leading grocer, who was a gunner in Lyon's Battery—and many another it barred out. Indeed, Father Minor got in only by the skin of his teeth. True enough he was a Company B man at the beginning; but he transferred early to another branch of the service and for most of the four years he rode with Morgan's men.
The committee in charge looked for a full attendance. It was felt that this would be one of the most successful dinners of them all. Certainly it would be by long odds the best advertised. It would seem that the Sunday editor of the Courier-Journal, while digging through his exchanges, came on a preliminary announcement in the columns of the Daily Evening News, which was our home paper; and, sensing a feature story in it, he sent one of his young men down from Louisville to spend two days among us, compiling facts, names and photographs. The young man did a page spread in the Sunday Courier-Journal, thereby unconsciously enriching many family scrapbooks in our town.
This was along toward the middle of April. Following it, one of the Eastern syndicates rewrote the piece and mailed it out to its constituent papers over the country. The Associated Press saw fit to notice it too; and after that the tale got into the boiler-plate shops—which means it got into practically all the smaller weeklies that use patent insides. It must have been a strictly non-newspaper-read-ing community of this nation which did not hear that spring about the group of old soldiers who for forty years without a break had held a dinner once a year with no outsiders present, and who were now, for the forty-first time, about to dine again.
Considering this publicity and all, the committee naturally counted on a fairly complete turnout. To be sure, Magistrate Matt Dallam, out in the country, could not hope to be present except in the spirit, he having been bedridden for years. Garnett Hinton, the youngest enlisted member of Company B, was in feeble health away off yonder in the Panhandle of Texas. It was not reasonable to expect him to make the long trip back home. On the tenth Mr. Napoleon B. Crump was called to Birmingham, Alabama, where a ne'er-do-well son-in-law had entangled himself in legal difficulties, arising out of a transaction involving a dubious check, with a yet more dubious signature on it. He might get back in time—and then again he might not.
On the other hand, Second Lieutenant Charley Garrett wrote up from his plantation down in Mississippi that he would attend if he had to walk—a mere pleasantry of speech, inasmuch as Lieutenant Garrett had money enough to charter for himself a whole railroad train should he feel so inclined. And, from his little farm in Mims County, Chickasaw Reeves sent word he would be there, too, no matter what happened. The boys could count on him, he promised.