“Hayes Donelson and I started to remonstrate but he silenced us with a look.  Then he drew a hurried transference of his Upper Cumberland property and put it on the table.  They threw again and he lost!  Then he smiled and with a steady hand wrote a conveyance of his home and plantation, the last things he had, as we knew, and laid that on the table.”

“No, Major,” exclaimed David with positive horror in his voice.

“Yes, it was madness, boy,” answered the major.  “Brown turned his ivories and we all held our breath as we read his four-three.  A mad joy flamed in Andrew’s face and he turned his cup with a steady wrist—­and rolled threes.  We none of us looked at Brown, a man who had led another man in whose veins ran a madness, where in his ran ice, on to his ruin.  We followed Andrew to the street to see him ride away in a gray drizzle to a gambled home—­and a wife and son.

“That morning deeds were drawn, signed, witnessed and delivered to Brown in his office.  Then—­then”—­the major’s thin, powerful old hands grasped the arm of his chair—­“we found him in the twilight under the clump of cedars that crowned the hill which overlooked Deep-mead Farm—­broad acres of land that the Seviers had had granted them from Virginia—­dead, his pistol under his shoulder and a smile on his face.  Just so he had looked as he rode at the head of our crack gray regiment in that hell-reeking charge at Perryville, and it was such a smile we had followed into the trenches at Franklin.  Stalwart, dashing, joyous Andrew, how we had all loved him, our man-of-smiles!”

“Can anything ever make it up to you, Major?” asked David softly.  As he spoke he refilled the major’s pipe and handed it to him, not appearing to notice how the lean old hand shook.

“You do, sir,” answered the major with a spark coming back into his eyes, “you and your gladness and the boy and his—­sadness—­and Phoebe most of all.  But don’t let me keep you from your hen-roost defense—­I agree with you that a hen farm will be the cheapest course for you to take with old Cross.  Give him my respects, and good-by to you.”  The major’s dismissal was gallant, and David went his way with sympathy and admiration in his gay heart for the old fire-eater whose ashes had been so stirred.

The major resumed his contemplation of the fire.  Hearty burning logs make good companions for a philosopher like the major, and such times when his depths were troubled he was wont to trust to them for companionship.

But into any mood of absorption, no matter how deep, the major was always ready to welcome Mrs. Matilda, and his expectations on the subject of her adventures had been fully realized.  As usual she had begun her tale in the exact center of the adventure with full liberty left herself to work back to the beginning or forward to the close.

“And the mystery of it all, Matilda, is the mystery of love—­warm, contradictory, cruel, human love that the Almighty puts in the heart of a man to draw the unreasoning heart of a woman; sometimes to bruise and crush it, seldom to kill it outright.  Mary Caroline only followed her call,” answered the major, responding to her random lead patiently.