With no shadow of annoyance on his handsome face, Dad continued to spank, while the car shook with howls of delight from a hundred throats--howls that quite downed the bargee’s lurid vocabulary. At length Dad paused. Palm significantly upraised, he asked gently: “President Lincoln is a great man, isn’t he?” “Y-yes,” groaned the bargee, after a moment of hesitation. “You’ll never forget that again?” “No.” “I’m glad. Get up now, and let’s be friends. Won’t you share my seat? Or--perhaps, under the circumstances, you’ll feel more comfortable to stand up for a while.” CHAPTER X SERGEANT DADD A sea of pale-green sward, bathed in a drift of pink-white apple-blossoms. Above, the softest of blue spring skies. In the middle distance the hazy mountains brave in their spring panoply. And, between mountains and apple-orchard, a line of trampled grain-fields, sown now with hundreds of sprawling dead men in dark blue and in light gray. Back of the glowing white orchard a dingy white city that had sprung to life overnight. A city of many long streets, each lined with battered canvas tents. Over one of these tents--a tent large and less dingy than its humbler fellows--floated an American flag topped by a gilded eagle. The veriest three-month recruit would have known the tent by its insignia as the temporary abode of the general commanding. Through the opening made by the pinned-back flap the interior was visible. At the back was a cot; beside it a shabby campaign trunk. In the tent’s center was a collapsible table, at which, on a campaign stool, sat a bearded man in a gold-laced blue coat which bore the rank mark of a general officer of the Union army. At attention in front of the general stood a tall, wiry man, bronzed of face, his grizzled hair close clipped, his eye the eye of a boy. Sergeant’s stripes adorned the arm of his fatigue jacket. Few of the old Eagle Hotel coterie back in Ideala would have recognized at a glance, in the trim, alert figure, their old crony, the portly and shambling Dad. The loose flesh that had accumulated during fourteen years of bibulous indulgence had vanished; to be replaced by hard muscle. The alcohol had been utterly banished from his system by nine months of hard working and clean, outdoor living. At Ideala he would have passed for sixty; here for little more than forty. “Sergeant Dadd,” said the general, looking up from some papers and maps on the table as the non-commissioned officer’s shadow fell athwart his vision, “I have sent for you to act as courier in getting copies of some important plans through to General Hooker. Your success in carrying a message across thirty miles of country infested by the enemy’s skirmishing parties last month has been reported to me. That is why I have sent for you now.” Dad’s face did not relax its look of military blankness. But a faint flush of pleasure tinged the tan of his cheeks.