The colonel had recognized the coming of the heat by donning his suit of linen, with a red tie at his throat to give the touch of color he always loved, and he had got out his broad-leaved Panama hat for its fifteenth season. Ford found him seated in the leather chair, swinging one thin leg over the other, his white hose wrinkling over his low shoes, telling Carroll how Grant came to Springfield from Galena seeking a commission in the army. Ford diplomatically broached the subject of a conference between the colonel and the senator. The colonel heard him to the end, but said nothing. His mustache simply lifted a little with the curl of his lip. Ford was evidently disappointed. “Have you any reply?” he asked, “or any message?” “Yes,” said the colonel, and his gray eyes flashed under their shaggy brows. “Present my compliments to Senator Warren, and tell him that if he ever presumes to speak to me again in all his life, I’ll slap his face, and if he resents it, I’ll kill him.” Ford tried to bow, and the colonel, turning to Carroll, said: “As I was saying, General Palmer happened to go into the adjutant-general’s office and saw Grant smoking a corn-cob pipe and working away on muster rolls at a broken table propped up in one corner of the room. The old forage cap he had worn in the Mexican War was lying on the table. It was the only hat he had in those days.” The next morning an interview with Warren appeared in all the papers. “I would prefer,” the senator was reported as saying, “to retire to private life and resume my interrupted law practice, if I were not compelled to seek vindication by the bushwhacking of this doting old ingrate, who, disappointed in his attempts to monopolize patronage that belongs to patriotic party workers, now skulks behind the sympathy his years and infirmities excite, to wage a guerrilla warfare.” The colonel read the interview at breakfast. He sat at the table with one paper propped up before him and four others beside his plate, his eye-glasses on his nose, and ate his oatmeal and his beefsteak and his boiled eggs just as he did on every morning of the year. Then he drank the half cup of coffee that he always reserved, with its cream slowly coagulating at the surface, for the end of his meal, because it was cooler then, laid his napkin down and shuffled slowly out. Half an hour later a man stopped by his chair in the lobby and said something to the colonel that made him drop his paper, and look up over his eye-glasses with a scowl. The man was known as Birdy Quinn, and he had lost his job in the water office the week before, because Warren wished to make room for a fellow who could deliver more votes at the coming primaries than Birdy could. “Are you sure?” the colonel asked. “Sure! Isn’t it all over the ward this morning?”