“Oh, that? That's a fureign word I picked up to-day.” And Sergeant Bagby smiled gently. “It's a pet name the Yankees use when they mean pardner!”
VI. ACCORDING TO THE CODE
THE most important thing about Quintus Q. Montjoy, Esquire, occurred a good many years before he was born. It was his grandfather.
In the natural course of things practically all of us have, or have had, grandfathers. The science of eugenics, which is comparatively new, and the rule of species, which is somewhat older, both teach us that without grandfathers there can be no grandchildren. But only one in a million is blessed even unto the third generation by having had such a grandfather as Quintus Q. Montjoy had. That, indeed, was a fragrant inheritance and by day and by night the legatee inhaled of its perfumes. I refer to his grandfather on his father's side, the late Braxton Montjoy.
The grandfather on the maternal side must have been a person of abundant consequence too, else he would never have begat him a daughter worthy to be mated with the progeny of that other illustrious man; but of him you heard little or nothing. Being long deceased, his memory was eclipsed in the umbra of a more compelling personality. It would seem that in all things, in all that he did and said in this life, Braxton Montjoy was exactly what the proud grandsire of a justly proud grandscion should be. He was a gentleman of the Old School in case that conveys anything to your understanding; and a first family of Virginia. He was a captain of volunteers in the War of Eighteen-Twelve. He was a colonel in the Mexican war; that though was after he emigrated out over the Wilderness Trail to the newer and cruder commonwealth of Kentucky. He was one of the founders of our town and its first mayor in that far-distant time when it emerged from the muddied cocoon of a wood-landing on the river bank and became a corporation with a charter and a board of trustees and all. Later along, in the early fifties, he served our district in the upper branch of the State Legislature. In the Civil war he would undoubtedly have been a general—his descendant gainsaying as much—except for the unfortunate circumstance of his having passed away at an advanced age some years prior to the beginning of that direful conflict. Wherefore the descendant in question, being determined that his grandfather should not be cheated of his due military meed by death, conferred an honourary brevet upon him, anyway.
Nor was that all that might be said of this most magnificent of ancestors—by no means was it all. Ever and always was he a person of lofty ideals and mountainous principles. He never drank his dram in a groggery nor discussed the affairs of the day upon the public highway. Spurning such new-fangled and effetely-luxurious modes of transportation as carriages, he went horseback whenever he went, and wheresoever. In the summer time when the family made the annual pilgrimage back across the mountains to Old White Sulphur he rode the entire distance, both going and coming, upon a white stallion named Fairfax. To the day of his death he chewed his provender with his own teeth and looked upon the world-at-large through eyes, unlensed.
Yet he might have owned a hundred sets of teeth or five hundred pairs of spectacles, had he been so minded, for to him appertained eighty slaves and four thousand acres of the fattest farm lands to be found in the rich bottoms of our county. War and Lincoln's Proclamation freed the slaves but the lands remained, intact and unmortgaged, to make easier the pathways of those favoured beings of his blood who might come after him. Finally, he was a duellist of a great and fearsome repute; an authority recognised and quoted, in the ceremonials of the code. In four historic meetings upon the field of honour he figured as a principal; and in at least three more as a second. Under his right shoulder blade, a cousin of President Thomas Jefferson carried to his grave a lump of lead which had been deposited there by this great man one fair fine morning in the Valley of Virginia, during the adjudication, with pistols, of a dispute which grew out of a difference of opinion touching upon the proper way of curing a Smithfield ham.
We did not know of these things at first hand. Only a few elderly inhabitants remembered Braxton Montjoy as he had appeared in the flesh. To the rest of our people he was a tradition, yet a living one, and this largely through virtue of the conversational activities of Quintus Q. Montjoy, the grandson aforesaid, aided and abetted by Mrs. Marcella Quistenbury.