People were streaming into town now, and I persuaded the tutor that there was no use for him to begin his studies again.  He said he would go fishing down the river and take a swim.  He would get back in time to hear the speaking in the afternoon.  So I got him a horse, and he came out with a long cane fishing-pole and a pair of saddle-bags.  I told him that he must watch the old nag or she would run away with him, particularly when he started homeward.  The tutor was not much of a centaur.  The horse started as he was throwing the wrong leg over his saddle, and the tutor clamped his rod under one arm, clutching for the reins with both hands and kicking for his stirrups with both feet.  The tip of the limber pole beat the horse’s flank gently as she struck a trot, and smartly as she struck into a lope, and so with arms, feet, saddle-pockets, and fishing-rod flapping towards different points of the compass, the tutor passed out of sight over Poplar Hill on a dead run.

As soon as he could get over a fit of laughter and catch his breath, the colonel asked: 

“Do you know what he had in those saddle-pockets?”

“No.”

“A bathing suit,” he shouted; and he went off again.

Not even in a primeval forest, it seemed, would the modest Puritan bare his body to the mirror of limpid water and the caress of mountain air.

* * * * *

The trouble had begun early that morning, when Gordon, the town sergeant, stepped from his door and started down the street with no little self-satisfaction.  He had been arraying himself for a full hour, and after a tub-bath and a shave he stepped, spic and span, into the street with his head steadily held high, except when he bent it to look at the shine of his boots, which was the work of his own hands, and of which he was proud.  As a matter of fact, the sergeant felt that he looked just as he particularly wanted to look on that day—­his best.  Gordon was a native of Wise, but that day a girl was coming from Lee, and he was ready for her.

Opposite the Intermont, a pistol-shot cracked from Cherokee Avenue, and from habit he started that way.  Logan, the captain of the Guard—­the leading lawyer in that part of the State—­was ahead of him however, and he called to Gordon to follow.  Gordon ran in the grass along the road to keep those boots out of the dust.  Somebody had fired off his pistol for fun and was making tracks for the river.  As they pushed the miscreant close, he dashed into the river to wade across.  It was a very cold morning, and Gordon prayed that the captain was not going to be such a fool as to follow the fellow across the river.  He should have known better,

“In with you,” said the captain quietly, and the mirror of the shining boots was dimmed, and the icy water chilled the sergeant to the knees and made him so mad that he flashed his pistol and told the runaway to halt, which he did in the middle of the stream.  It was Richards, the tough from “the Pocket,” and, as he paid his fine promptly, they had to let him go.  Gordon went back, put on his everyday clothes and got his billy and his whistle and prepared to see the maid from Lee when his duty should let him.  As a matter of fact, he saw her but once, and then he was not made happy.