“Ez I recollect, he felt called upon to put out first fur Richmond to give President Davis and the Cabinet the benefit of his advice or somethin'; and aimed to join us later. But he didn't—somehow, somethin' always kept inter-ferin' with his ambition to bleed and die, until after a while it seemed like he jest got discouraged and quit tryin'. When we got back home, four years later—sech ez was left of us—Heck had done been entirely reconstructed and was fixin' to run fur office on the Black Radical ticket.”
“The cat had to jump mighty brisk to beat Hector,” said Doctor Lake; “or else, when she landed on the other side, she'd find him already there, wanning a place for her. I've known a good many like Hector—and some of them prospered fairly well—while they lasted.”
“Well, the spring of Sixty-one was a stirrin' period, and I reckin oratory helped along right smartly at the start,” said Judge Priest; “though, to be sure, later on it came to pass that the boys who could go hongry and ragged, and still keep on fightin' the Yankees, were the ones that really counted.
“Take Meriwether Grider now: He went in as our company commander and he come out with the marks of a brigadier on his coat collar; but I'll bet you a ginger cookie Meriwether Grider never said a hundred words on a stretch in his life without he was cussin' out some feller fur not doin' his duty. Meriwether certainly learned to cuss mighty well fur a man whose early trainin' had been so turribly neglected in that respect.”
“Recall how Meriwether Grider behaved the night we organised Company B?” inquired Doctor Lake.
“Jest the same ez ef it was yistiddy!” assented Judge Priest.
He half turned his chubby body so as to face me. By now I was sitting on the log between them. I had scented a story and I craved mightily to hear it, though I never dreamed that some day I should be writing it out.
“You see, boy, it was like this: Upstate the sentiment was purty evenly divided betwixt stayin' in the Union and goin' out of it; but down here, in Red Gravel County, practically everybody was set one way—so much one way that they took to callin' our town Little Charleston, and spoke of this here Congressional District as the South Carolina of the West. Ez state after state went out, the feelin' got warmer and warmer; but the leaders of public opinion, all except Heck Dallas, counselled holdin' off till the legislature could act. Heck, he was for crossin' over into Illinois some nice pleasant dark night and killin' off the Abolitionists, though at that time of speakin' there weren't many more Abolitionists livin' on that side of the river than there were on this. That was merely Heck's way of expressin' his convictions.
“In spite of his desires, we kept on waitin'. But when word come from Frankfort that the legislature, by a mighty clost vote, had voted down the Secession Ordinance and had declared fur armed neutrality—which was in the nature of a joke, seein' ez everybody in the state who was old enough to tote a fusee was already armed and couldn't be a neutral—why, down in this neck of the woods we didn't wait no longer.
“Out of the front window of his printin' office old Colonel Noble h'isted the first Confederate flag seen in these parts; and that night, at the old market house, there was the biggest mass meetin' that ever had been held in this here town up to then. A few young fellers had already slid down acrost the border into Tennessee to enlist, and a few more were already oyer in Virginia, wearin' the grey; but everybody else that was anybody was there.