“Aw, shucks!” exclaimed Bill Hinkle, now in disgrace himself and therefore more in sympathy with Bob. “You fellows know a lot, don’t you! You’re smart, ain’t you! W’y, Bob Bannister’s the best man you got. I’ll back him to lick any three of you, with one hand tied behind ’is back, by jimminy! You’ve made regular nincompoops o’ yourselves, you have. Aw, shucks!” And the deeply and doubly disgusted one walked away. So did Bob Bannister walk away. He went with bent head and breaking heart. To be denied the right to join with his companions in any demonstration looking to his country’s glory or welfare was, to him, a tragedy. His was one of those natures endowed at birth with a spirit of patriotism. From the time when he could first read he had absorbed the history of his country and her heroes. No colors had ever shone before his eyes more brilliant and beautiful than the red, white, and blue of his country’s flag. With an intuition far beyond his years, he had grasped the meaning and foreseen the consequences of a dissolution of the compact that bound the states together. And when, at last, the storm broke, when Sumter fell, when Bull Run came, an awakening calamity, he threw his whole heart and soul into the cause of the North, and from that time on he lived in spirit, and would have died in body, with the Union armies, fighting, that the old flag and all that it symbolized might prevail. Yet, strange as it may seem, his father, with whom he lived, of whom he was proud and fond, to whom he was loyally obedient, was an outspoken sympathizer with the Southern Confederacy. Perhaps it was the strain of Southern blood in his veins, perhaps it was the underlying aristocracy of feeling of those whose ancestors have owned slaves, perhaps it was the clear logic of his mind running in the narrow grooves that genius so often hollows out, that led Rhett Bannister into his passionate sympathy with the South. Be that as it may, he was no coward. What he was, what he felt, what he thought, was known of all men. Opposition could not conquer him, opprobrious epithets could not cow him, nor could ostracism silence his eloquent tongue.