The sergeant wore a little skirtless jacket, absurdly high-collared, faded to all colors and falling to pieces with age. Three tarnished buttons and a rag of rotted braid still dung to its front. Probably it had fitted the sergeant well in the days when he was a slim and limber young partisan ranger; but now the peaked little tail showed halfway up his back where his suspenders forked, and his white-shirted paunch jutted out in front like a big cotton pod bursting out of a gray-brown boll. The sergeant wore his jacket on all occasions of high military and civic state--that, and a gangrened leather cartridge-box bouncing up and down on his plump hip--and over his shoulder the musket he had carried to war and back home again, an ancient Springfield with a stock like a log butt and a hammer like a mule's ear, its barrel merely a streak of rust. He walked side by side with his closest personal friend and bitterest political foe, Major Ashcroft, late of the Ninth Michigan Volunteers--walking so close to him that the button of the Loyal Legion in the major's left-hand lapel almost touched the bronze Southern Cross pinned high up on the right breast of the sergeant's flaring jacket. From time to time the sergeant, addressing the comrades ahead of him, would poke the major in the side and call out: “Boys, I've took the first prisoner--this here pizen Yank is my meat!” And the imperturbable major would invariably retort: “Yes, and along about dark the prisoner will have to be loading you into a hack and sending you home--the same as he always does.” Thereupon a cackling laugh would run up the double line from its foot to its head.