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“No, but I’ve got a suit of butternuts back home. ”

“Gee, have you? Say, were you ever a raider?”

“No, but I know lots about raiders, and once I had dinner with Colonel Mosby. ”

“Gee, did you? Say, what’s your name? Say, are you a gen’rul?”

“No, I was a high private. My name is Gale. What is your name, if I may ask you, as one man to another?”

“I’m Jimmy Martin. I live across the street. My dad’s got a great big phonograph and seventy records. Were you a high private? How high? Gee, tell me about the raiders!”

“But James, why should a loyal Northerner like you desire to know anything about the rebel horde?”

“Well, you see, I’m the leader of the Boy Scouts, and we haven’t any Scout Master, at least we did have, but he moved away, and I have to think up games for the Scouts, and gee, we’re awfully tired of discovering the North Pole, and being Red Cross in Belgium, and I always have to be the Eskimos when we discover the North Pole, or they won’t play, and I thought maybe we could be raiders and capture a Yankee train. ”

“Well, you come sit on the porch, James. It occurs to me that you are a new audience for my stories. Let us proceed to defend Richmond, and do a quick dash into Illinois, to our common benefit. Is it a bargain?”

It was, and Jimmy listened, and Mrs. Tiffany came out and listened also and the three lovers of the Heroic Age sat glowing at one another till from across the village street, long and thin and drowsy, came the call, “Jim-m-m-ee Mar-r-r-tin!”

Later, Jimmy’s mother was surprised to discover her heir leading a Confederate raid, and she was satisfied only when she was assured that the raid was perfectly proper, because it was led by General Grant, and because all the raiders had voluntarily set free their slaves.

It was Jimmy Martin who enticed Mr. Gale to go spearing pickerel, and they two, the big slow-moving man and the boy who took two skips to his one solid pace, plowed through the willow thickets along the creek all one Saturday afternoon.

At the end of the trip, Jimmy cheerfully announced that he would probably get a whale of a licking, because he ought to have been chopping stovewood. Mr. Gale suggested strategic measures; he sneaked after Jimmy, through a stable door to the Martins’ woodshed, and cut wood for an hour, while Jimmy scrabbled to pile it.

In the confidences of Jimmy and in Mrs. Tiffany’s stories of her Vermont girlhood and pioneer days in Minnesota, Mr. Gale found those green memories of youth which he had hoped to discover, on coming North, in comradely talks with veterans of the Wakamin G. A. R.

But now there was no G. A. R. at all in Wakamin.

During the past year the local post had been wiped out. Of the four veterans remaining on Decoration Day a year before, three had died and one had gone West to live with his son, as is the Mid–Western way. Of the sturdy old men who had marched fifty strong to Woodlawn Cemetery a decade before, not one old man was left to leaven the land.

But they did live on in Mrs. Tiffany’s gossip, as she begged Mr. Gale to assure her that there would be a decorating of the graves, though the comrades were gone. This assurance Mr. Gale always gave, though upon sedulous inquiry at the barber shop he discovered that there was very little chance for a celebration of the Day. The town band had broken up when the barber, who was also the bandleader, had bought a car. The school principal had decided that this year it was not worth while to train the girls to wear red-white-and-blue cheesecloth, and sing “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” from a decked-over hay wagon.