Jonas Scruggs glanced keenly at her from under his bushy, grizzled eyebrows, his lips solemnly puckered, and his stubbly pointed chin resting on his knotty hands, which were clasped upon his stout stick. He had the dispassionate, pondering aspect of an umpire, which seemed to invite the cheerful submission of differences. “Ye knows I war fur the Union, an’ so war his dad,” she continued. “My old man had been ailin’ ennyhows, but this hyar talk o’ bustin’ up the Union--why, it jes’ fairly harried him inter his grave. An’ I ’lowed ez Hil’ry would be fur the Union, too, like everybody in the mountings ez hed good sense. But when a critter-company o’ Confeds rid up the mounting one day Hil’ry he talked with some of ’em, an’ he war stubborn ever after. An’ so he jined the critter-company.” She fell suddenly silent, and taking up her needles knitted a row or two, her absorbed eyes, kindling with retrospection, fixed on the far horizon, for Mrs. Knox was in a position to enjoy the melancholy pleasures of a true prophet of evil, and although she had never specifically forewarned Hilary of the precise nature of the disaster that had ensued upon his enlistment, she had sought to defer and prevent it, and at last had consented only because she felt she must. She had her own secret satisfaction that the result was no worse; it lacked much of the ghastly horrors that she had foreboded--death itself, or the terrible uncertainty of hoping against hope, and fearing the uttermost dread that must needs abide with those to whom the “missing” are dear. Never now could the fact be worse, and thus she could reconcile herself, and talk of it with a certain relish of finality, as of a chapter of intense and painful interest but closed forever. The old man nodded his head with deliberative gravity until she recommenced, when he relapsed into motionless attention. “An’ Hil’ry fought in a heap o’ battles, and got shot a time or two, an’ war laid up in the horspital, an’ kem out cured, an’ fought agin. An’ one day he got inter a quar’l with one o’ his bes’ frien’s. They war jes’ funnin’ afust, an’ Hil’ry hit him harder’n he liked, an’ he got mad, an’ bein’ a horseback he kicked Hil’ry. An’ Hil’ry jumped on him ez suddint ez a painter, ter pull him out’n his saddle an’ drub him. Hil’ry never drawed no shootin’ irons nor nuthin’, an’ warn’t expectin’ ter hurt him serious. But this hyar Jack Bixby he war full o’ liquor an’ fury; he started his horse a-gallopin’, an’ ez Hil’ry hung on ter the saddle he drawed his bowie-knife an’ slashed Hil’ry’s arm ez war holdin’ ter him agin an’ agin, till they war both soakin’ in blood, an’ at last Hil’ry drapped. An’ the arm fevered, an’ the surgeon tuk it off. An’ so Hil’ry hed his discharge gin him, sence the Confeds hed no mo’ use fur him. An’ he walked home, two hunderd mile, he say.”