Uncle Cesar bore this imputation upon his personal courage with a broad grin.
"I warn't no soldier-man, ole Marse," he explained. "I was jes' your body-servant, and I was skeered of Yankees, and I'se skeered of 'em now."
"You needn't be afraid of me, Uncle Cesar," he said.
"Yankees is mighty cur'rus. In the wartime, they jes' as soon kill a man as wring a chicken's neck."
"But I must say," added the Colonel, "that although Cesar always disappeared promptly as soon as we got into a dangerous place, he invariably turned up when the trouble was over, and with something hot for me to eat or something to drink--which he called coffee, and was almost as good."
"'Twuz parched corn, an' taters cut up an' roasted. An' mos' in gineral, I could find somebody's cow to milk for ole Marse," Uncle Cesar added with another grin.
"That black rascal, sir," he said, indicating the faithful and devoted servitor, "could milk a cow into a bottle and never spill a drop. But there weren't any cows to rob in the trenches around Petersburg that Christmas day of '64, eh, boy?"
The Colonel's tone was joking, but in his eyes, as they met those of his gray-haired "boy," was a sombre expression. The bygone tragedy rose before the old soldier and his "boy." Once more they saw the pinched faces of the starving soldiers, the scanty portions of miserable food, the agonies of cold and hunger, and from the far-off years came back the sullen booming of the cannon, the frightful shriek of the bursting shells, the cracking of bullets. "In the trenches"--the phrase was enough to raise gruesome ghosts and awful phantoms from their bloody graves.
It was Betty who brought the two old men away from sad Christmas memories.
"Well, Granddaddy," she said, "it's all over now, thank heaven, and we have everything to be proud of on both sides. I am so glad that I am a soldier's daughter, and so proud when I can say so."
At that, Fortescue, who quickly adopted the quaint and old-fashioned customs of people like Colonel Beverley and Betty, rose from the table and gave Betty a military salute, which delighted her beyond words.
When dinner was over, Betty insisted that Fortescue should instruct her in the manual of arms, and, with a broomstick for a gun, Betty went through with the whole manual, to the Colonel's intense delight.