“Happy,” said Colonel Talbot, gravely rebuking, “I am surprised at your father.  I thought he was a patriot.”

“He is, sir, but he’s a financier first, and I may be thankful for it some day.  I’ll venture the prediction right now that if we lose this war not a single Confederate bill will be in the possession of Thomas Langdon, Sr.  Others may have bales of it, worth less per pound than cotton, but not your humble servant’s father, who, I sometimes think, has lots more sense than your humble servant’s father’s son.”

Colonel Leonidas Talbot shook his head slowly.

“Finance is a mystery to me,” he said.  “In the dear old South that I have always known, the law, the army and the church were and are considered the high callings.  To speak in fine, rounded periods was considered the great gift.  In my young days, Harry, I went with my father by stage coach to your own State, Kentucky, to hear that sublime orator, the great Henry Clay.”

“What was he speaking about, sir?” asked Harry.

“I don’t remember.  That’s not important.  But surely he was the noblest orator God ever created in His likeness.  His words flowing like music and to be heard by everybody, even those farthest from the speaker, made my pulse beat hard, and the blood leap in my veins.  I was heart and soul for his cause, whatever it was, and, yet I fear me, though I do not wish to hurt your feelings, Harry, that the state to which he was such ornament, has not gone for the South with the whole spirit that she should have shown.  She has not even seceded.  I fear sometimes that you Kentuckians are not altogether Southern.  You border upon the North, and stretching as you do a long distance from east to west and a comparatively short distance from north to south, you thus face three Northern States across the Ohio—­Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and the pull of three against one is strong.  You see your position, don’t you?  Three Yankee states facing you from the north and only one Southern state, Tennessee, lying across your whole southern border, that is three against one.  I fear that these odds have had their effect, because if Kentucky had sent all of her troops to the South, instead of two-thirds of them to the North, the war would have been won by us ere this.”

“I admit it,” said Harry regretfully.  “My own cousin, who was more like a brother to me, is fighting on the other side.  Kentucky troops on the Union side have kept us from winning great victories, and many of the Union generals are Kentuckians.  I grieve over it, sir, as much as you do.”

“But you and your people should not take too much blame to yourselves, Harry,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire, who had a very soft heart.  “Think of the many influences to which you were exposed daily.  Think of those three Yankee states sitting there on the other side of the Ohio—­Ohio, Indiana and Illinois—­and staring at you so long and so steadily that, in a way, they exerted a certain hypnotic force upon you.  No, my boy, don’t feel badly about it, because the fault, in a way, is not so much yours as it is that of your neighbors.”