." The colonel, proud of his language, looked
around the family circle. "And we at our humble board, with our plain
though--shall I say nutritive--yes, nutritive and wholesome fare,
should thank our lucky stars that John Barclay keeps the Golden Belt
Wheat Company going, and your husband and father can make a more or
less honest dollar now and then to supply your simple wants."

The colonel had more in his mind, for he rose and began to pace the
floor in a fine frenzy. But Mrs. Culpepper looked up for an instant
from her tea, and said, "You know you forgot the mail to-day, father,"
and he replied, "Yes, that's so." Then added: "Molly dear, will you
bring me my overcoat--please?"

The girl bundled her father into his threadbare blue army overcoat
with the cape. He stood for a moment absently rattling some dimes in
his pocket. Then the faintness of their jingle must have appealed to
him, for he drew a long breath and walked majestically away. He was a
tall stout man in the midst of his forties, with a military goatee and
black flowing mustaches, and he wore his campaign hat pinned up at the
side with the brass military pin and swayed with some show of swagger
as he walked. His gift of oratory he did not bring to the flower of
its perfection except at lodge. He was always sent as a delegate to
Grand Lodge, and when he came home men came from all over the county
to see the colonel exemplify the work. But as he marched to funerals
under his large white plume and with his sword dangling at his side,
Colonel Martin Culpepper, six feet four one way and four feet two the
other, was a regal spectacle, and it will be many years before the
town will see his like again.

The colonel walked over to the post-office box and got his mail, then
took a backless chair and drew it up to the sand box in which the
stove sat, and the conversation became general in its nature, ranging
from Emerson's theory of the cosmos and the whiskey ring to the
efficacy of a potato in the pocket for rheumatism. Finally when they
had come to their "don't you remembers" about the battle of Wilson's
Creek, General Ward, with his long coat buttoned closely about him,
came shivering into the store to get some camphor gum and stood
rubbing his cold hands by the stove while the clerk was wrapping up
the package. His thin nose was red and his eyes watered, and he had
little to say. When he went out the colonel said, "What's he going to
run for this year?"

"Hav