"That's about the meanest thing I ever heard," said the boy.
"So I thought," the Kentuckian answered, "an' so the poor lad seemed to think too. I saw he was tryin' to speak, an' I put my ear close to his lips, thinkin' he might have some message he wanted to give. But, tryin' to look in the direction where Howkle had gone, he whispered, 'Don't blame the Union.' He was thinkin' more o' the credit o' his side than of his own sufferin's."
"That was grit," said Hamilton approvingly. "Did he die, Uncle Eli?"
"Not a bit of it. We got him back into our lines an' he was exchanged, I believe. Anyway, I know he was livin' after the war, fo' I saw his name once on a list o' veterans. But most o' the boys were like that--mostly young, too--an' men o' the stripe of Isaac Howkle were very few."
"But you got him in the end, didn't you?"
The old mountaineer looked intently at the boy's excited face.
"I didn't," he said, "an' I don' rightly know that it's good for yo' to be hearin' all these things. Yo' might hold it against Jake Howkle."
"That I wouldn't," protested Hamilton. "Jake isn't to blame for his father's meanness."
"That's the right way to talk," the old soldier agreed. "Wa'al, if yo' feel that way about it, I reckon thar's no harm in my tellin' yo' the rest of it, now that I've got started. When the war was all over an' I got back hyeh, I remembered what had happened, an' I sent word to Isaac Howkle that I didn' trust him, an' after what he had done I was reckonin' that he was waitin' his chance to get me, an' that he'd better keep his own side o' the mountain."
"But, Uncle Eli," said the boy, "that didn't make a feud surely; that was only a warning."
"I wasn't reckonin' to start a feud at all," said the old man thoughtfully, "an' it really never was one. It was jes' a personal difference between Isaac Howkle an' me. Thar was lots o' times that I could have picked off either o' his two brothers, but I was jes' guardin' myself against Isaac."
"But you said he got there first!" said the boy. "Did he shoot some one in your family?"
"Wa'al, yes, he did," the mountaineer admitted "Yo' never knew the one. He was my brother-in-law,--Ab's younges' sister's first husband. He had been married jes' two months, an' was only a hundred yards from this house when Isaac shot him."