of life, he had carried himself
like a lance. The whiteness of age in his woolly hair was not reflected
in the iron spirit that upheld his wrinkled body. But the shame of those
words spoken on parade had undone that, as suddenly as ashes crumble
before the touch.

The days immediately following the publishing of Buff's sentence were
nightmares of pain and humiliation. The old negro could hardly bring
himself to go to headquarters at first sergeant's call. When he did go,
he moved heavily, like a man asleep, and with his eyes fixed on the
ground, that he might not meet the curious, pitying glances of his
fellow soldiers.

After a week of this, old Jeremiah began to make mistakes at drill and
mistakes in his troop papers; a thing hitherto unknown. Finally
Lieutenant Perkins, the troop commander, lost his patience at some bull
the old sergeant made, and called him down roughly, in the presence of
the troop.

"Look here, Sergeant Wilson, I won't have any more of this. I'll bust
you higher than a kite. I don't care if you've had fifty years of
service. If you are mooning about that worthless boy of yours, you had
better get over it. It's a damn good riddance, and you know it as well
as I do. You'll have to take a brace or something will drop."

If Perkins had not been born several degrees north of Mason and Dixon's
line he would have known better than that; as it was, he did not
understand these negroes. He hadn't the faintest conception of how to
handle these simple-hearted black men. He was not popular with them at
any time, and this unheard-of piece of cruelty cut every tender-hearted
trooper as deeply as if it had been aimed at him personally. This was
the first break, and, as a consequence, something did drop, in a way
that Perkins hardly expected.

The old sergeant made no reply to this reprimand, but simply stood at
attention, though his black, weazened face worked and his lips trembled.
It was the first time since he was a buck private that he had been
spoken to in such a manner. For the first time, the yoke of discipline
galled him. The bitterness of his inferiority and servitude was as
wormwood within him. The harsh injustice of such treatment in this, his
black hour, after years of faithful work, aroused in him a demon of
resentment that made him long to strike back.

The occurrence startled him from his lethargy. He suddenly realized that
his son's few remaining hours on earth were slipping by, and the boy