The major chuckled again, delighted: "He did, sir! he did! Beauregard had no braver officer. To see that man lead his command into the teeth of the Yankees was a spectacle nobody who saw it can ever forget." The little man stood up as he talked, gesticulating fiercely as if in the presence of the foe, his linen coat flapping about his legs, his white hat set jauntily on one side. "Ha! those were pleasant days, squire," wiping his forehead in a glow of triumph. "They brought men up to their proper level! Boyer was never promoted, though. He was too modest to push himself, and war was hardly the right groove for him, after all."
"So this great man was a personal friend of yours, Sam?" asked Byloe with another wink and shrug at the crowd.
The major nodded: "Yes. I wasn't always a drunken loafer in Sevier, nor Ike Byloe's companion," he said quietly.
There was a laugh of applause. The little man, with all his vaporing, his windy boasts, his general utter worthlessness, had at bottom a grain of something genuine which keen Ike Byloe lacked.
"What sort of looking man was this Boyer, Sam?" asked the doctor. "I confess I have a curiosity about the jedge's heir."
"Oh, a fine-looking fellow—every inch a man," said the major carelessly. "Voice orotund, magnetic. Easy manners. Good figure;" and he walked up and down complacently, slapping his own shrunk shank. There had been a well-shaped leg inside of the ragged linen trousers once, and the conscious merit which infused every atom of his lean little body still culminated in his strut.
The sun was setting behind the Balsam Range, and threw a cheerful glow over the oak and the pump and the little group, when a loose-jointed figure came across the fields.
"Hyar's Grayson!—Well, colonel, how is he?"
"It's all over, gentlemen. The jedge is gone."
There was a sudden silence. The men asked no questions, as Northern gossips would have done. Presently, they got up one by one, with a brief word or two, and went quietly away to their own houses to close them up, and to tell madam. The Carolinian "madam" may be ugly and shabby and silly, but she is usually first in her husband's mind all day.