Dad, through his mildly rubicund nose, made a weird sound, variously and incorrectly expressed in print as “H-m!” or “Humph!” It was a sound as derisive as it was wordless. The misfit-teeth man glowered at him. “Well,” he drawled, “I take it, Dad, that you don’t agree with me. You generally don’t. But that don’t make it any the less true.” “No, Mr. Stage,” returned Dad, “I don’t. This war will be wound up inside of another three months at longest. When the fighting spirit of the North is once aroused--when this glorious Union, one and indissoluble, once sets its foot down; the Confederacy will collapse like a pricked toy balloon. You must grant me credence, when I prophesy this. I know the United States and I know war.” “Let me see,” mused Stage, scratching his chin in deep reflection. “Let me see--you _do_ know war, don’t you, now? I seem to remember you were in our little unpleasantness down in Mexico, some years back. And speaking of wars, I wonder you don’t enlist. You’re still a hearty man. And the North needs men. Why not go to the front again?” Dad’s face flushed so hotly that his nose actually paled by contrast. “I--I am forced to remain at home for business reasons,” he said, coldly. “Otherwise--” “There’s a whole lot of ‘otherwises,’ these days,” commented Stage. “Some of ’em pleading business and some playing sick.” “If you are questioning _my_ courage, Mr. Stage,” sternly interposed Dad, emptying his whisky-skin at a gulp, “let me tell you that when I was in Mexico--” “Mexico,” echoed the cripple, chuckling as at some pleasant memory. “That’s right, Mexico. I’d forgot. You held a commission of some sort in our war down there, didn’t you? Queer you never showed it to any of us. It’d be inte_rest_ing to see. Did you stay out the whole war? I disremember, just now. Or did you skedaddle before it was over?” A furtive snicker ran through the little knot of loungers. Someone guffawed. Dad swept the assemblage with an eye whose hint of bleariness had momentarily been burned away by a blaze that startled them all. Then, settling his hat farther forward on his head, he strode out into the street without answering. As he passed through the swing-door he heard Stage’s wheezy voice announce to nobody in particular: “I guess that’s the time I scored one--or maybe a couple or more--on Mr. James Brinton, Esq. Another time he won’t crow quite so loud, now that I’ve took him down a peg. He needn’t think he can be cock-of-the-walk over us all the time. Him that slunk back here in rags fourteen years ago, after he was kicked out of the army for drunk and disorderly!” The departing listener winced as he shuffled away out of ear-shot. It was one thing to know that all the neighborhood must be aware of his past. It was another to have the knowledge supplemented by auricular proof. And the words, chuckled unctuously from between old Stage’s misfit teeth-sets, stung like so many hornets.