“Don't you worry about me,” the sergeant was prompt to tell him.. “You and Lew Lake and Hector Woodward and the other boys kin represent Gideon K. Irons Camp without me fur oncet anyway. And say, listen, Judge,” he added with malice aforethought, “you'd better borrow a goosehair cushion, or a feather tick, or somethin' soft, to set on out yonder. Them plain pine benches are liable to make a purty hard roostin' place, even fur an old seasoned cavalryman.”
Judge Priest's retort, if he had one in stock, remained unbroached, because just then their hostess bustled out to announce dinner was on the table. It was to be an early dinner and a hurried one, because, of course, everybody wanted to start early, to be sure of getting good seats for the speaking. The sergeant ate his right where he was, his feet in his tub, like a Foot-washing Baptist.
There were servants aplenty within, but the younger Miss Grundy elected to serve him; a pretty girl, all in snowy white except for touches of red at her throat and her slender belted waist, and upon one wrist was a bracelet of black velvet with old soldiers' buttons strung thickly upon it. On a tray, daintily tricked out, she brought the sergeant fried chicken and corn pudding and butter beans, and the like, with com pones hot-buttered in the kitchen; and finally a slice carved from the blushing red heart of the first home-grown watermelon of the season. Disdaining the false conventions of knife and fork the sergeant bit into this, full face.
Upon the tub bottom his inflamed toes overlapped and waggled in a gentle ecstasy; and between bites, while black seeds trickled from the corners of his lips, he related to the younger Miss Grundy the beginning of his story of that memorable passage of words upon a certain memorable occasion, between General John C. Breckinridge and General Simon Bolivar Buckner. The young lady had already heard this same beginning thrice, the sergeant having been a guest under the parental roof since noon of the day before, but, until interruption came, she listened with unabated interest and laughed at exactly the right places, whereupon the gratified narrator mentally catalogued her as about the smartest young lady, as well as the prettiest, he had met in a coon's age.
All good things must have an end, however—even a watermelon dessert and the first part of a story by Sergeant Jimmy Bagby; and so a little later, rejecting all spoken and implied sympathy with a jaunty indifference that may have been slightly forced, the sergeant remained, like another Diogenes, in the company of his tub, while the rest of the household, including the grey-haired Reverend Doctor Grundy, his white-haired wife, Judge Priest and the two Misses Grundy, departed in a livery-stable carryall for a given point half a mile up the street, where a certain large skating rink stretched its open doors hospitably, so disguised in bunting and flags it hardly knew itself by its grand yet transient title of Reunion Colosseum. Following this desertion, there was for a while in all directions a pleasurable bustle to keep the foot-fast watcher bright as to eye and stirred as to pulse.
“Why, shuckins, there ain't a chance fur me to git lonely,” he bade himself—“not with all this excitement goin' on and these here hoofs of mine to keep me company!”
Crowds streamed by afoot, asaddle and awheel, all bound for a common destination. Every house within sight gave up its separate group of dwellers and guests; for during reunion week everybody takes in somebody. Under the threshing feet the winnowed dust mounted up in scrolls from the roadway, sifting down on the grass and powdering the chinaberry trees overhead. No less than eight brass bands passed within sight or hearing. And one of them played Maryland, My Maryland; and one of them played The Bonnie Blue Flag—but the other six played Dixie, as was fitting.
A mounted staff in uniform clattered grandly by, escorting the commanding general of some division or other, and an open carriage came along, overflowing with a dainty freightage of state sponsors and maids-of-honour. As it rolled grandly past behind its four white horses, a saucy girl on the back seat saw an old man sitting alone on the Grundy porch, with his feet in a tub, and she blew a kiss at him off the tips of her fingers; and Sergeant Bagby, half rising, waved back most gallantly, and God-blessed her and called her Honey!
Soon, though, the crowds thinned away. Where multitudes had been, only an occasional straggler was to be seen. The harried and fretted dust settled back. A locust in a tree began to exercise his talents in song, and against the green warp of the shrubbery on the lawn a little blue bobbin of an indigo bird went vividly back and forth. Lonesome? No, nothing like that; but the sergeant confessed to himself that possibly he was just a trifle drowsy. His head dropped forward on his badged chest, and as the cool wetness drew the fever out of his feet his toes, under water, curled up in comfort and content.
Asked about it afterward, Sergeant Bagby would have told you that he had no more than closed his eyelids for a wink or two. But the shadows had appreciably lengthened upon the grass before a voice, lifted in a hail, roused him up. Over the low hedge that separated the parsonage yard from the yard adjoining on the left a man was looking at him—a man somewhere near his own age, he judged, in an instantaneous appraisal.