She came back to the boy.
"My father was a soldier in the Civil War," he was telling her,
"a scout an' a spy. The rebels were going to hang him twice for a
spy. At the battle of Wilson's Creek he ran half a mile with his
captain wounded on his back. He's got a bullet in his leg right
now, just above the knee. It's been there all these years. He let
me feel it once. He was a buffalo hunter and a trapper before the
war. He was sheriff of his county when he was twenty years old.
An' after the war, when he was marshal of Silver City, he cleaned
out the bad men an' gun-fighters. He's been in almost every state
in the Union. He could wrestle any man at the railings in his
day, an' he was bully of the raftsmen of the Susquehanna when he
was only a youngster. His father killed a man in a standup fight
with a blow of his fist when he was sixty years old. An' when he
was seventy-four, his second wife had twins, an' he died when he
was plowing in the field with oxen when he was ninety-nine years
old. He just unyoked the oxen, an' sat down under a tree, an'
died there sitting up. An' my father's just like him. He's pretty
old now, but he ain't afraid of nothing. He's a regular
Anglo-Saxon, you see. He's a special policeman, an' he didn't do
a thing to the strikers in some of the fightin'. He had his face
all cut up with a rock, but he broke his club short off over some
hoodlum's head."
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