President.
Jefferson Davis was expected on the morrow, and would be inaugurated on
the day following. They heard that his coming was already a triumphal
progress. Vast crowds held his train at many points, merely to see him
and listen to a few words. Generally he spoke in the careful, measured
manner that was natural to him, but it was said that in Opelika, in
Alabama, he had delivered a warning to the North, telling the Northern
states that they would interfere with the Southern at their peril.

Harry and Arthur, despite their eagerness to see the town and the great
men, were compelled to wait. The Palmetto Guards went into camp on the
outskirts, and their commander, Colonel Leonidas Talbot, late of the
United States Army, was very strict in discipline. His second in
command, Major Hector St. Hilaire, was no whit inferior to him in
sternness. Harry had expected that this old descendant of Huguenots,
reared in the soft air of Charleston, would be lax, or at least easy
of temper, but whatever of military rigor Colonel Talbot forgot,
Major St. Hilaire remembered.

The guards were about three hundred in number, and their camp was
pitched on a hill, a half mile from the town. The night, after a
beautiful day, turned raw and chill, warning that early spring, even
in those southern latitudes, was more of a promise than a performance.
But the young troops built several great fires and those who were not
on guard basked before the glow.

Harry had helped to gather the wood, most of which was furnished by the
people living near, and his task was ended. Now he sat on his blanket
with his back against a log and, with a great feeling of comfort,
saw the flames leap up and grow. The cooks were at work, and there
was an abundance of food. They had brought much themselves, and the
enthusiastic neighbors doubled and tripled their supplies. The pleasant
aroma of bacon and ham frying over the coals and of boiling coffee
arose. He was weary from the long journey and the work that he had done,
and he was hungry, too, but he was willing to wait.

All the troops were South Carolinians except Harry and perhaps a dozen
others. They were a pleasant lot, quick of temper, perhaps, but he
liked them. Their prevailing note was high spirits, and the most
cheerful of all was a tall youth named Tom Langdon, whose father owned
one of the smaller of the sea islands off the South Carolina coast.
He was quite sanguine that everything wo