Then the stranger stepped across the limestone gutter and walked up to the Colonel’s horse, He was still smoking.  This move, too, was surprising enough, It argued even more assurance.  Stephen listened intently.

“Colonel Blair, my name is Grant,” he said briefly.

The Colonel faced quickly about, and held out his gloved hand cordially, “Captain Ulysses Grant,” said he; “of the old army?”

Mr. Grant nodded.

“I wanted to wish you luck,” he said.

“Thank you, Grant,” answered the Colonel.  “But you?  Where are you living now?”

“I moved to Illinois after I left here,” replied Mr. Grant, as quietly as before, “and have been in Galena, in the Leather business there.  I went down to Springfield with the company they organized in Galena, to be of any help I could.  They made me a clerk in the adjutant general’s office of the state I ruled blanks, and made out forms for a while.”  He paused, as if to let the humble character of this position sink into the Colonel’s comprehension.  “Then they found out that I’d been quartermaster and commissary, and knew something about military orders Now I’m a state mustering officer.  I came down to Belleville to muster in a regiment, which wasn’t ready.  And so I ran over here to see what you fellows were doing.”

If this humble account had been delivered volubly, and in another tone, it is probable that the citizen-colonel would not have listened, since the events of that day were to crown his work of a winter.  But Mr. Grant possessed a manner of holding attention..  It was very evident, however; that Colonel Blair had other things to think of.  Nevertheless he said kindly: 

“Aren’t you going in, Grant?”

“I can’t afford to go in as a captain of volunteers,” was the calm reply:  “I served nine years in the regular army and I think I can command a regiment.”

The Colonel, whose attention was called away at that moment, did not reply.  Mr. Grant moved off up the street.  Some of the younger officers who were there, laughed as they followed his retreating figure.

“Command a regiment!” cried one, a lieutenant whom Stephen recognized as having been a bookkeeper at Edwards, James, & Doddington’s, and whose stiff blue uniform coat creased awkwardly.  “I guess I’m about as fit to command a regiment as Grant is.”

“That man’s forty years old, if he’s a day,” put in another.  “I remember when he came here to St. Louis in ’54, played out.  He’d resigned from the army on the Pacific Coast.  He put up a log cabin down on the Gravois Road, and there he lived in the hardest luck of any man I ever saw until last year.  You remember him, Joe.”

“Yep,” said Joe.  “I spotted him by the El Sol cigar.  He used to bring a load of wood to the city once in a while, and then he’d go over to the Planters’ House, or somewhere else, and smoke one of these long fellows, and sit against the wall as silent as a wooden Indian.  After that he came up to the city without his family and went into real estate one winter.  But he didn’t make it go.  Curious, it is just a year ago this month than he went over to Illinois.  He’s an honest fellow, and hard working enough, but he don’t know how.  He’s just a dead failure.”