“And sir, she wore that flag under her skirts for four years, and she kept it always and when she died it was her shroud. You remember, Billy,--you were one of the pall bearers?” he would say, turning to Judge Priest. And Judge Priest would say he remembered mighty well and the talk would go swinging back and forth, but generally back, being concerned mainly with people that were dead and things that were done years and years before I was born. Major J. Q. A. Pickett was apt to be of the company, dapper and as jaunty as his game leg would let him be, always in black with a white tube rose in his buttonhole. The Major was a born boulevaidier without a boulevard, a natural man about town without the right kind of a town to be about in, and a clubman by instinct, yet with no club except the awnings under Soule's drug store, and the screening of dishrag vines and balsam apples on Priest's front porch. Also in a far corner somewhere, little Mr. Herman Felsburg of Felsburg Brothers, our leading clothiers, might often be found. Mr. Felsburg's twisted sentences used to tickle me. I was nearly grown before I learned, by chance, what Mr. Felsburg himself never mentioned--that he, a newly landed immigrant, enlisted at the first call and had fought in half a dozen hard battles before he properly knew the English for the commands of his captain. But my favorite story-teller of them all, was old Cap'n Jasper Lawson, and he was old--old even to these other old men, older by a full twenty years than the oldest of them, a patriarch of the early times, a Forty-niner, and a veteran of two wars and an Indian Campaign. For me he linked the faded past to the present and made it glow again in vivid colors. Wherever he was, was an Arabian Nights Entertainment for me. He lives as a memory now in the town--his lean shaven jowl, and his high heeled boots and the crimson blanket that he wore winters, draped over his shoulders and held at the throat with a pin made of a big crusty nugget of virgin California gold. Wearing this blanket was no theatrical affectation of Cap'n Jasper's--it was a part of him; he was raised in the days when men, white and red both, wore blankets for overcoats. He could remember when the Chickasaws still held our end of the State and General Jackson and Governor Shelby came down and bought it away from them and so gave to it its name of The Purchase. He could remember plenty of things like that--and what was better, could tell them so that you could see before your eyes the burnished backs of the naked bucks sitting in solemn conclave and those two old Indian fighters chaffering with them for their tribal lands. He was tall and sparse and straight like one of those old hillside pines, that I have seen since growing on the red clay slopes of the cotton country south of us; and he stayed so until he died, which was when he was away up in the nineties. It was Cap'n Jasper this night who told the story of Singin' Sandy Biggs.