The old negro stood before him, immaculately neat, though his garments were ragged and time-worn. Dignity sat upon his aged form like virtue upon a venerable Roman senator. Indeed, there flashed through the banker’s mind the thought that men like this one who stood before him might have sat in the Carthaginian council of war and planned the campaign which led young Hannibal to the declivities of the Alps where his horde of Africans hung like a storm-cloud while Imperial Rome trembled with fear behind the protection of her walls. Then fifty years rolled backward like a scroll. Gaitskill saw a blood-strewn battlefield torn with shot and shell; he saw clouds of smoke, black, acrid, strangling to the throat, rolling over that field as fogs blow in from the sea; he saw a tall, young, black man emerge from such a pall of smoke carrying a sixteen-year-old boy dressed in the bloody uniform of a Confederate soldier. The young soldier’s arms and legs dangled against the negro’s giant form as he walked, stepping over the slippery, shot-plowed ground. He saw the negro stagger with his burden to an old sycamore tree and lay the inanimate form upon the ground at its roots, composing the limbs of the boy with beautiful tenderness; then he saw the negro straighten up and gather into his giant paws a broken branch of a tree which two men could hardly have handled. Waving this limb at the creeping pall of smoke, he screamed like a jungle beast, and whooped: “You dam’ Yanks, keep away from dis little white boy--you done him a-plenty--he’s dead!” Gaitskill stood up and stepped forward. He held out a strong white hand, clasping the palsied brown paw of Popsy Spout. No white man ever received a warmer greeting, a more cordial welcome than this feeble black man, aged, worn, tottering through the mazy dreamland of second childhood. Unnoticed, Scootie Tandy walked to a window and seated herself. The two old men sat down beside the table and Scootie listened for two hours to reminiscences which went back over half a century. Frequently Popsy Spout’s mind wandered, and Gaitskill gave him a gentle stimulant of liquor, as thoughtful of the darky’s waning strength as a courtier would be of the comfort of a king. “How old are you now, Popsy?” Gaitskill smiled, after they had talked of old times. “I’s sebenty year old--gwine on a hundred.” “Do you really expect to live that long?” Gaitskill asked. “Yes, suh, ef de white folks takes good keer of me,” Popsy answered. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a bulky package, tied up with many pieces of many-colored string. “Dat’s my money, Marse Tommy. Please unwrop it an’ count it out loud fer me.” Gaitskill poured the currency and coins upon the table and with a money-handler’s expert ease, he counted it aloud, announcing the total in about a minute: “One thousand dollars!”