Si took the carpetsack under his arm, and they trudged up toward Army Headquarters.
Relieved of anxiety as to his own personal safety, and having found his son, Deacon Klegg viewed everything around him with open-eyed interest. It was a wonderfully new and strange world into which the sober, plodding Indiana farmer had dropped. The men around him spoke the speech to which his ears were accustomed, but otherwise they were as foreign as if they had come from the heart of China.
Their dress, their manners, their actions, the ways in which they were busying themselves, had no resemblance to anything seen on the prosaic plains of the Wabash in his half-century of life there. The infantry sweeping over the fields in endless waves, the dashing cavalcades of officers and staffs, the bewildering whirl of light batteries dazed him. Even Si awed him. It was hard to recognize in the broad-shouldered, self-assured young soldier, who seemed so entirely at home in his startling surroundings, the blundering, bashful hobbledehoy boy of a few months before, whose feet and hands were constantly in the way, and into everything else that they should not be.
"Somehow, Si," he said, looking at his offspring with contemplative eye, "you seem to have growed like a cornstalk in July, and yit when I come to measure you you don't seem no taller nor heavier than when you went away. How is it?"
"Don't know, Pap," Si answered. "I feel as if I'd had more'n 10 long years o' growth since we crossed the Ohio River. Yit, you don't seem a minute older than when I went away."
"I didn't feel no older," returned the father, "until I got in that guard-house last night. Then I could feel my hair gittin' grayer every hour, and my teeth droppin' out."
"I'm afraid you didn't git much chance to sleep, Pap," said Si sympathetically.
"Loss o' sleep was the least part of it," said the Deacon feelingly. "I kin stand a little loss o' sleep without any partickler bother. It wasn't bein' kept awake so much as the way I was kept awake that bore on me."
"Why, what happened?" asked Si.
"Better ask what didn't happen," groaned his father. "Used to have some mighty rough shivarees when I was a boy, and'd jest settled on the Wabash. Lots o' toughs then, 'specially 'mong the flatboat-men, who'd nothin' to drink but new sod-cornwhisky, that'd fight in every spoonful. But for sure, straight-out tumultuousness that guard-house last night gave six pecks for every bushel of a Wabash shivaree."