To his feet once more and floundering on, across the ford; then he fell on his face at full length, on the northern bank; his hands digging deeply into the soil. “My country!” he sobbed, hysterically. “My own, _own_ country!” Then, as an echo, chilling his wild joy, he found himself murmuring incoherently: “Dishonorably--dismissed!” CHAPTER IV FOURTEEN YEARS LATER “Dad” leaned right luxuriously against the bar of the Eagle House, a brimming whisky-skin in one hand, a long and ill-smelling cigar in the other. His shining frock coat was thrown back wide from a vest that had once been white. A slouch hat was pushed far back on his head, and a mass of gray-white hair fell carelessly over his forehead. His somewhat bleared eyes gazed loftily upon the habitués of the place, and his aristocratic, but slightly reddened nose was curved in mild contempt at something one of them happened at that moment to be saying. Dad was an imposing figure. There was not lacking those who declared he was even yet a fine figure of a man--even though a covert grin went with the praise. And more than one woman was wont to follow, with a gaze almost as admiring as it was disapproving, his stately thrice-a-day progress down Main Street from his riverside cottage to the Eagle barroom. No one in Ideala was so ignorant of Dad’s habits as to imagine for a moment that three daily visits to the Eagle entailed only three drinks thereat. Indeed, his regular evening sojourn at that hospitable tavern was often prolonged until closing time, and his return bedward was not infrequently under a highly necessary escort. Still, though he might--and continuously did--drink with them, Dad could never be induced to regard the Eagle’s other patrons as his equals; either mentally or morally. And he took no pains to cloak his feelings. Which did not add appreciably to his popularity among the convivial band. To-day--on his first morning visit--Dad was unwontedly superior in his bearing toward his fellow tipplers. For the talk was on war--the time was the summer of 1861--and the Civil War had already entered bloodily upon the first of its four years. One company, three months earlier, had marched gayly forth from Ideala upon the calcium path of patriotism--to be shot to atoms in the first battle of Manassas. And now a second and a third were forming. “Yes,” a crippled oldster was declaring from the far end of the bar, his words percolating ludicrously through a double set of misfit teeth, “yes, gentlemen, Uncle Sam will find he’s in for a good long siege of it before he’s done. He thought he’d have Jeff Davis licked to a standstill in three months. Well, the three months are up. And, so far, it’s been Uncle Jeff that’s done all the licking. I tell you, this war’s going to last out the year and maybe part of next.”