her
cases, where the poor chaps weren't important enough to be heard about
or from. He was just captured instead of killed, and went from Libby to
Andersonville, from Andersonville to Macon, and when Lee surrendered he
came home, thin's a shadow, shaking with ague and with eyes bigger
than burnt holes in a blanket. Pitiful figure he was, I tell you. I was
running a livery business in Carmel village then, and Josh hired me to
take him out to the farm.

"I broke the thing to him on the way. Made my throat ache, now I tell
you, Mr. Parker. Made my eyes smart and the fields and sky look blurry
to see that poor wreck, with everything gone, and know that the hog that
had stayed to home was enjoying it all.

"And what made me, as a man, despise Gid Ward more was the fact that he
had been colonel of a state regiment in old militia days, boosted there
by a gang that trained with him, and as soon as war broke out and the
regiment was mustered in he resigned like a sneak, and couldn't be
touched by a draft.

"Josh always was a quiet chap. He humped over a little more when I told
him, and looked thinner, and I had to help him more when he got out at
the farm than I did when he got aboard at the stable. He allowed he'd go
to the farm just the same. Said he didn't have any money, or any other
place to go, and he guessed 'twas his home, anyway.

"Mr. Parker, I haven't got the language to tell ye how that woman looked
when she came to the door and saw me helping Josh out to the ground.
No sir, I don't want to think of it--how she sank right down in that
doorway, and her head went over sidewise and her eyes shut and--and her
heart stopped, I guess."

The postmaster blew his nose and snapped his eyes and cleared his throat
with difficulty. Parker had forgotten his figures.

"Gid came round the corner of the house, seeing the team drive up, and
what do you suppose he said when he saw his brother back from the grave,
as you might say? He looked him over, not offering to shake his hand,
and then he says, 'Well, living skelington, it's goin' to cost something
to plump you out again, ain't it?'

"When I saw the look on Josh's face at that, I'd have hauled off and
cuffed Gid's head up to a pick, swan if I wouldn't, but the Marshall
girl--excuse me, Mis' Ward--came tearin' down the path, and threw her
arms round Josh's neck and cried, 'O my poor brother!' And I came away.

"It was too much for me. My eyes were so full that I run agains