“Who oversees the planting?” sharply.

McKinstry wondered vaguely at the little Doctor’s curious interest in the Gurneys, but went on with his torpid, slow answers.

“That eldest girl, I believe, Grey.  Cow there, you see, and ducks.  He’s popular, old Father Gurney.  People have a liking for his queer ways, help him collect specimens for his cabinet; the boys bring him birds to stuff, and snakes.  If it hadn’t been for the troubles breaking out, he was on the eve of a most im-por-tant discovery,—­the crater of an exhausted volcano in Virginia.”  McKinstry lowered his voice cautiously.  “Fact, Sir.  In Mercer County.  But the guerrillas interfered with his researches.”

“I think it probable.  So he stuffs birds, does he?” Blecker’s lips closing tighter.

“And keeps the snakes in alcohol.  There are shelves in Miss Lizzy’s room quite full of them.  That lower room it was, but Joseph has taken it for a study.  She has the upper one for her flowers and her father’s birds.”

“And Grey, and the twins, and the four boys bedaubed with molasses, and the dog, and the cooking?”

“Stowed away somewhere,” the Captain mildly responded.

Dr. Blecker was testy.

“You know Joseph, her brother?  I mean our candidate for Congress next term?”

“Yes.  Democratic.  J. Schuyler Gurney,—­give him his name, Mac.  Republican last winter.  Joseph trims to wind and tide well.  I heard him crow like a barn-yard fowl on the Capitol-steps at Washington when Lincoln called for the seventy-five thousand:  now, he hashes up Breckinridge’s conservative speech for your hickory-backed farmers.  Does he support the family, Mac?”

“His election-expenses are heavy.”

“Brandy-slings.  I know his proclivities.”

McKinstry colored.  Dr. Blecker was coarse, an ill-bred man, he suspected,—­noting, too, the angry repression in his eyes, as he stood leaning on the gate, looking in at the Fort, for they had reached it by this time.  The Captain looked in, too, through the dusky clumps of altheas and plum-trees, at the old stone house, dyed tawny-gray in the evening light, and talked on, the words falling unconscious and simple as a stream of milk.  The old plodder was no longer dumb.  Blecker had hit on the one valve of the shut-up nature, the obstinate point of self-reliant volition in a life that had been one long drift of circumstance.  This old stone house, shaggy with vines, its bloody script of Indian warfare hushed down and covered with modern fruit-trees and sunflowers,—­this fort, and the Gurneys within it, stood out in the bare swamped stretch of the man’s years, their solitary bit of enchantment.  They were bare years,—­the forty he had known:  Fate had drained them tolerably dry before she flung them to him to accomplish duty in;—­the duty was done now.  McKinstry, a mild, common-faced man, had gone through it for nearly half a century, pleasantly,—­never called it heroism.