If the descendants of the Sutler are snobs and sneaks and shams, social swells and moral lepers, with breath sweetly perfumed and hearts bitter as Peruvian bark tempered with aloes, they owe no part of their equivocal character or position to the influence of wealth derived from him, for he had none. Thus by his lack of lucre to bequeath, he has avoided many horrible and torturing responsibilities. For a man who has been ruined by a woman there is no law and no judge. The inheritor of lightly won riches enters the race for success in life with a handicap weighty as the breech of a disabled columbiad.
Gaze not upon the red rectification of the illicit still; quaff sparingly the purple vintage of the Iowa drug store; yield not to temptation at the stage of a game where the jack-pot boils over; drop not your precious cash into the open palm of financial enthusiasts whose soaring souls see cloudbursts of wealth in every fleece of floating vapor; yield no credence to the millionaire who boasts of his large inheritance from a Sutler's profits.
As a rallying point in battle, rivaling redans, redoubts and parapets, rifle-pits, abattis and _chevaux-de-frise_, the Sutler's wagon has been apostrophized in many bursts of eloquence at reunion banquets where wit and wine flow sparkling like the dew. When thrust out between contending armies by design or accident, that modest vehicle became a glittering prize worth fighting for and risking amputations for, beside which even the old flag paled for a space its ineffectual splurge.
Friends, comrades who had lived together in the little shelter tent, slept under the same blanket, divided the scanty ration and drank from the same canteen, rallied around its doubtful treasures with all the swift energy of a benzine explosion. Foes, hungry as sawtooth sharks, assailed and reassailed it, the rich fruition of their whetted desires. Where was the hilarious Sutler then with his bluegrass fertility of resource? Neither in that beleaguered thesaurus nor even entrenched beneath it, you may confidingly affirm, but likeliest from safe shelter of some commodious, commanding stump, observing the struggle with a rural Sunday morning cheerfulness. Like George Eliot's hero, he is lord of the moment's change and can charge it with his soul.