Late at night his legs had given way as he breasted a hill. He had fallen forward and slept where he fell; to stagger stiffly onward at dawn. From a peon vender he had bought a great stack of _tortillas_ and a bundle of _tamales_ on the second day, and had stuffed them into all his pockets; munching now and then when he chanced to think of it. The purchase had been half-involuntary; some latent campaigning instinct leading him to buy the food for future use. In payment he had given a five-dollar gold piece; the only coin he chanced to have in his pocket; and it had not occurred to him to ask for change. Somewhere along the road he had seen the broad-brimmed straw hat lying; its frayed brim and a hole in the crown testifying to its uselessness to a former owner. He had picked it up and put it on, in exchange for his shelterless military cap, as a better shield against the sun’s broiling heat. For several days Brinton continued his blind progress northeastward. He had met few people. And at these he had not so much as glanced. Such of them as were Mexicans noted appraisingly his ragged state (for cactus spines and rocks had claimed their full toll of cloth-scraps in the blundering journey), and decided he was not worth molesting and had let him go in peace. A stray American soldier, here and there, had taken him for a deserter and, out of pity, had looked the other way. The war was practically at an end. They saw no reason for dragging back to punishment a man who seemed so anxious to get home; nor to report seeing him. At last the numbness lifted, bit by bit, from Brinton’s mind. And he knew it had not been the numbness of drink, but of shock. He came to his senses to find himself repeating mechanically, for the thousandth time: “Dishonorably--dismissed--from the service you have--disgraced!” The odd repetition of the prefix “dis” in the three pregnant words of the sentence stood out in his memory. He could shut his eyes and see Scott’s rage-bloated face, as the general had flung the phrase at him. “Dishonorably dismissed from the service you have disgraced!” That was it. And the torn-off epaulets had dangled from Scott’s gnarled fists as the sentence was spoken. “Dishonorably dismissed!” Brinton, like a child who bites on a sore tooth, fell to recalling his own father--veteran of the war of 1812. The grandfather whom he dimly remembered as a bent, withered giant--the once herculean captain who at the battle of Saratoga had with a single backhand stroke of his cavalry saber sliced off the head of a British dragoon. At home hung the musket--the “Queen’s Arm” gun--that his great-grandfather had carried in the French and Indian War, and later, as a very old man, at Concord and Lexington. “Three generations of them,” he mumbled, half-aloud. “Fighters all. And I don’t know how many generations before that. One in every one of our wars. And I was the fourth. I guess it meant more to me than to any of them.