tics and Old Valley of Virginia. He called
him an old bluffer too.

He was wrong there, though, certainly. Though the major talked pretty
exclusively about the war, I took notice that he rarely talked about the
part he himself had played in it. Indeed, he rarely discussed anybody
below the rank of brigadier. The errors of Hood's campaign concerned him
more deeply than the personal performances of any individual. Campaigns
you might say were his specialty, campaigns and strategy. About such
things as these he could talk for hours--and he did.

I've known other men--plenty of them--not nearly so well educated as the
major, who could tell you tales of the war that would make you see
it--yes, and smell it too--the smoke of the campfires, the unutterable
fatigue of forced marches when the men, with their tongues lolling out
of their mouths like dogs, staggered along, panting like dogs; the
bloody prints of unshod feet on flinty, frozen clods; the shock and
fearful joy of the fighting; the shamed numbness of retreats; artillery
horses, their hides all blood-boltered and their tails clubbed and
clotted with mire, lying dead with stiff legs between overturned guns;
dead men piled in heaps and living men huddled in panics--all of it. But
when the major talked I saw only some serious-minded officers, in
whiskers of an obsolete cut and queer-looking shirt collars, poring over
maps round a table in a farmhouse parlor. When he chewed on the cud of
the vanished past it certainly was mighty dry chewing.

There came a day, a few weeks after I went to work for the Evening
Press, when for once anyway the major didn't seem to have anything to
say. It was in the middle of a blistering, smothering hot forenoon in
early June, muggy and still and close, when a fellow breathing felt as
though he had his nose buried in layers of damp cotton waste. The city
room was a place fit to addle eggs, and from the composing room at the
back the stenches of melting metals and stale machine oils came rolling
in to us in nasty waves. With his face glistening through the trickling
sweat, the major came in about ten o'clock, fanning himself with his
hat, and when he spoke his greeting the booming note seemed all melted
and gone out of his voice. He went through the city room into the room
behind the partition, and passing through a minute later I saw him
sitting there with one of Sidley's exchanges unfolded across his knee,
but he wasn't reading it. Present