Two of the men had risen, young and strong.  The General’s cane pounded—­he had their eyes!  “Left, right, left, right—­all over the world men are marching, and you sit here—­”

The years seemed to have dropped from him.  His voice rang with a fire that had once drawn men after him.  He had led a charge at Gettysburg, and his men had followed!

And these two men would follow him.  He saw the dawn of their resolve in their faces.  “There’s fine stuff in both of you,” he said, “and the country needs you.  Isn’t it better to fight than to sit here?  Get into my car and I’ll take you down.”

“Aw, what’s eatin’ you,” one of the older men growled.  “What game’s this?  Recruitin’?”

But the young men asked no questions.  They came—­glad to come.  Roused out of a lethargy which had bound them.  Waked by a ringing old voice.

The General was rather quiet when he reached home.  Jean and Bronson, who had suffered torments, watched him with concerned eyes.  And, as if he divined it, he laid his hand over Jean’s.  “I did a good day’s work, my dear.  I got two men for the Army, and I’m going to get more—­”

And he did get more.  He went not only in the rain, but in the warmth of the sun, when the old fruit trees bloomed along the tow path, and the backs of the mules were shining black, and the women came out on deck with their washing.

And always he spoke to the men of marching feet—.  Now and then he sang for them in that thin old voice whose thinness was so overlaid by the passion of his patriotism that those who listened found no flaw in it.

  “He has sounded forth the trumpet that has never called retreat,
  He is sifting forth the hearts of men before his Judgment seat,
  O be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet,
  Our God is marching on—­”

There was no faltering now, no fumbled words.  With head up, singing—­“Be jubilant, my feet—­”

Sometimes he took Jean with him, but not always.  “There are places that I don’t like to have you go, my dear, but those are where I get my men.”

At other times when he came out to where she sat in the car there would flash before his eyes the vision of his wife’s face, as she, too, had once sat there, waiting—­

Sometimes he took the children, and rode with them on a slow-moving barge from one lock to another, with the limousine meeting them at the end.

So he travelled the old paths, innocently, as he might have travelled them throughout the years.

Yet if he thought of those difficult years, he said never a word.  He felt, perhaps, that there was nothing to say.  He took to himself no credit for the things he was doing.  If age and infirmity had brought to him a realization of all that he had missed, he was surely not to be praised for doing that which was, obviously, his duty.

Yet it gave him a new zest for life, and left Jean freer than she had been before.  It left her, too, without the fear of him, which had robbed their relationship of all sense of security.