So, on the day of the arrival, the committee of welcome was at Carbon Creek a full hour before the train was due, so fearful were they lest by some unforeseen delay they should be one minute too late. In due time the procession, half a hundred strong, started on its way to Mount Hermon, the band in the first wagon playing “Marching through Georgia.” All along the route there was, as the newspapers said next day, “a continuous ovation.” Farm-houses were decorated, flags were flying everywhere, groups of cheering citizens stood at every crossroad. When they reached the borough line, they all descended from the wagons and formed on foot to march to the village green. Not quite as they had formed in other days under Southern skies, for now there was no one in command; officers and privates alike were in the ranks to-day, marching shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, in one long, glad, home-coming procession. But you couldn’t keep those ranks in order; no one could have kept them in order. One old veteran said that Ulysses Grant himself couldn’t have kept the men in line, there was so much cheering, so much hand-shaking, so many waiting wives and mothers and children to be kissed and hugged and kissed again. And long before the great tent on the green was reached there was no more semblance of order in those happy ranks, than you would have found among a group of schoolgirls out for a holiday. Private Bannister and his son were both in the procession. Not that it was Rhett Bannister’s choice to be there. He had thought to make the journey back to his home quietly and alone, in much the same way that he had left it nearly two years before, and there await such welcome, good or ill, as the people of the community might see fit to give him. But his comrades simply would not have it so. Indeed, they refused absolutely to go together, or to partake in the ceremony of welcome, unless he would go with them. So he went, not without many misgivings, fearing the worst, yet hoping for the best. And the best came. His record in the ranks had preceded him long before. The story of his conversion by Abraham Lincoln was a story that his neighbors never wearied of telling. And if there was one thing more than another on which Mount Hermon prided herself, next to having as one of her own boys the youngest commissioned officer in the Army of the Potomac, it was on the fact that Rhett Bannister, the once hated, despised, and outlawed copperhead, had become one of the best and bravest and truest soldiers in the armies of his country. And so Mount Hermon welcomed him. Nor could he for one moment doubt the sincerity of his welcome. The hearty handclasp, the trembling voice, the tear-dimmed eye with which old friends and neighbors greeted him, left no room for questionings. One block from the public square Henry Bradbury came upon them. He put his one remaining arm around Bob’s shoulders and hugged him till he winced.