"Ahoy!" the voice cried after us, and we stopped rowing. "Are you Ben Cree?"
And here is evidently where this story ends, since it is not a biography; for a story should know its own right beginning and end, just as a biography should not maunder over neighboring generations. The rest is only coming aboard the _Saratoga_--where I had a dim, weary notion of familiar faces, and went to sleep in a bunk, and woke to see Uncle Benson standing over me, very prim and natty. "Well, Bennie!" he said, "it seems to me you've been out pretty late nights." And I had slept near a dozen hours, while the _Monitor_ and the _Merrimac_ were rubbing the muzzles of their cannon together, in plain sight from the _Saratoga's_ deck, making a mess of naval warfare.
Calhoun afterwards went off and enlisted, and fell in some Western fighting. Cavarly I have seen since, indeed not so long ago, and shaken hands with quite friendly, and Ben Cree has worn a captain's title these years and has wondered whether he ever deserved it.
For while a man is in the thick of his life he speculates little; he fights, he stays quiet, he runs, as seems best to his sense and suited to his feelings or the way he has been trained; he has few opinions on the subject, and those only fitting each event. Everything about him seems at that time but a stage, where he plays his part hastily and quite absorbed.
But afterwards he would like to think he has played his part well, and he hardly knows. Sometimes there is a bit of handclapping here and there, but the Author and Master of the play says nothing till it is all over and the curtain has fallen.
"Some folks," Calhoun used to say, "want to know everything before they've done anything. Why, Bennie, you don't know two and two make four till you've put 'em together. Why? Because they _don't_ make four till you've put 'em together."
"But you know they _will_ make four," I would answer for the argument.
"Well," he would say, "I've known a two and two that was as good as a dozen. And I've known another two and two that was worse than nothing."
That was an odd man whom I never understood.
But I think if I were to choose one man to go with into the wilderness, it would be Calhoun and no other; and I suppose that is one kind of friendship, as the old poets declare. For the matter of knowing and doing, it is good arithmetic for a man to know how to put two and two together so as to make whatever he needs. That is Ben Cree's saying, the sense of which he learned from one Sabre Calhoun, when they lay out nights on sand or in undergrowth and watched the pole star hopefully.