Dad walked away, his feet on air; the angry fuming of the general behind him sounding like wondrous music in his ears.
All at once he seemed like Christian in his favorite “Pilgrim’s Progress” to have dropped from his shoulders a world-heavy burden which had crushed him to earth. All at once his terrible secret was seen by him through Hooker’s keen eyes. And from that moment it forever lost its terror.
“I--I wish,” he murmured, “I wish I knew just exactly where Mrs. Sessions is. I’d love to tell her. And, till I can tell her--I guess I’ll be happy over it all alone. James Brinton. Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton. Of Taylor’s staff!”
Brevet-Major James Dadd, of the Blankth Ohio Infantry, was one of his own tent’s three occupants.
Seated cross-legged on a blanket roll facing the cot where sat his grandfather, was Battle Jimmie. Between the boy’s knees reclined the tent’s third inmate, his Canine Majesty, Emperor Napoleon Peter Bub Bonaparte Brinton Dog, whose august title had been whittled down by custom and verbal necessity to “Emp.”
Emp was exploring regions of his yellow back for fleas, biting at the unseen pests with multitudinous, swift little chattering snaps of half-shut jaws.
“I wonder just exactly what breed Emp really is?” conjectured Jimmie.
“Why,” answered Dad reflectively, “I should say, at a broad guess, that the blood of the finest thoroughbreds flows in his veins.”
“Gee! Honest? What kinds of thoroughbreds, I wonder?”
Jimmie glanced at him in doubt. But the man’s face was solemn, even judicious; and the boy eyed his pet with respect.
To Jimmie, Dad’s word was gospel. And if Dad declared Emp the scion of many thoroughbreds there was no room for arguing the statement.
“H’m!” commented Jimmie. “And father called him a mongrel.”
“Son,” explained Dad, “there’s two kinds of folks in this funny world of ours--the sort that sees the quality of the various bloods in a yellow dog, and the kind that sees only the quantity. Let’s you and I always try to see the quality. We won’t make so much money as those that see the quantity; but we’ll have a higher regard for dogs--and for everything else.
“Not that I’m criticizing your father, for one minute,” he added hastily. “He’s a fine man, and a son to be proud of. And he’ll go far. But not as a soldier.