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?" "Haven't you heard?" replied McHurdie, and to the colonel's negative Watts replied, "Governor--the uprising's going to nominate him." "Yes," said Frye, "and he'll go off following that foolishness and leave his wife and children to John or the neighbours." "Do you suppose he thinks he'll win?" asked the Colonel. "Naw," put in McHurdie; "I was talking to him only last week in the shop, and he says, 'Watts, you boys don't understand me.' He says, 'I don't want their offices. What I want is to make them think. I'm sowing seed. Some day it will come to a harvest--maybe long after I'm dead and gone.' I asked him if a little seed wouldn't help out some for breakfast, and he didn't answer. Then he said: 'Watts--what you need is faith--faith in God and not in money. There are no Christians; they don't believe in God, or they'd trust Him more. They don't trust God; they trust money. Yet I tell you it will work. Go ahead--do your work in the world, and you won't starve nor your children beg in the streets.'" McHurdie stopped a moment to gnaw his plug of tobacco. "The general's gitting kind of a crank--and I told him so." "What did he say?" inquired the colonel.