“Yes, they treated this boy very ill. Colonel Carey, you know, aspires to the colonelcy of the regiment to be raised in the county and has got himself elected the head of the committee in charge of enlistments. Carey knows my record in the Mexican War perfectly well when I was his superior in rank. This morning when I reached the room in the clerk’s office where Carey was presiding over what he calls a board of enlistment or something of the sort, there I found this boy. All they had to do was to look at him to know that he is fully capable of bearing arms and accustomed to an outdoor life, but because he was not eighteen they simply refused to listen to him and told him to go back to his Latin grammar. This was most humiliating to the boy’s feelings.”
“It made me so mad I wanted to knock ’em both down,” cried Archie angrily.
“And were you going to enlist, my little boy?” said Mrs. Tremaine, the light of proud motherhood coming into her eyes. She put her arm around the boy’s neck and kissed him on his forehead.
“Yes, I was, mother, and I can shoot as straight as either Richard or Neville.”
Here Lyddon, who had come up, spoke. “That is true, my lad, but all experience proves that although boys like you can fight as well as men, they can’t march as well and they only fill up the hospitals.”
“But,” continued Colonel Tremaine, his wrath rising, “the language and conduct of Carey and Yelverton to me was far more exasperating. I did not attempt to disguise my age, seventy-two next September, but as hardy as any one of my sons. I took a high tone with Carey and I think he would have accepted my services. But then Yelverton, whom I have known as boy and man for nearly sixty-five years, who was born and brought up within four miles of Harrowby, took it upon himself to inform Carey that I had rheumatism, sciatica, lumbago, and half a dozen other diseases that I never heard of before, and absolutely laughed at the notion of my doing military duty; laughed in my face.”
“My hero,” said Mrs. Tremaine softly, as if she were sixteen and the colonel were twenty, while Angela, slipping her hand into Colonel Tremaine’s, kissed him on the cheek and said, “What a brave old warrior you are! If I were a Yankee I should certainly run when I saw you coming at me.”
The colonel’s list of injuries was not yet exhausted and he continued wrathfully: “But then what do you suppose I discovered? Yelverton, whose age I know as well as mine—he will be sixty-four this very month—I find had already enlisted as surgeon and proposes to accompany the troops to the front. I am as robust a man as Yelverton, more so, in fact, and told him so to his face when I found out his unhandsome conduct. Anthony Yelverton is young enough to serve in the Southern Army, but I am not.” The colonel struck himself dramatically in the breast with his left hand, while his right arm, stiffly extended, held his riding crop as if it were a sword. Mrs. Tremaine duly condoled with the colonel upon Dr. Yelverton’s reprehensible conduct.
One of those present, however, heard with unmixed satisfaction of the result of the colonel’s expedition. This was Hector, who, as soon as he found there was no chance of the colonel’s going to war, professed the most reckless valor and assumed the air of a military daredevil. “Never you min’, ole Marse,” he said, confidentially, “me’be you an’ me kin run ’way an’ jine de army. Doan’ you ’member de song dey used to sing in de Mex’can War, ‘Ef you wants to have a good time, jine de cava’ry!’”
“Yes, you black rascal, I do, and I also remember that I had to drag you by the hair of your head from Harrowby to the City of Mexico, but nobody made better time than you coming back.”