In spite of the starry shield, supported by two crossed cannon cut out of tin and surmounted by the national bird in the same material, which hung proudly over the transom outside; in spite of the drummer-boy from the fort, who broke the silence into slivers at intervals throughout the day; in brief, in spite of his own martial bearing and smart uniform, the sergeant found trade very slack.  At Rivermouth the war with Mexico was not a popular undertaking.  If there were any heroic blood left in the old town by the sea, it appeared to be in no hurry to come forward and get itself shed.  There were hours in which Sergeant O’Neil despaired of his country.  But by degrees the situation brightened, recruits began to come in, and finally the town and the outlying districts—­chiefly the outlying districts—­managed to furnish a company for the State regiment.  One or two prominent citizens had been lured by commissions as officers; but neither of the two Rivermouthians who went in as privates was of the slightest civic importance.  One of these men was named James Dutton.

Why on earth James Dutton wanted to go to the war was a puzzle to the few townsfolk who had any intimate acquaintance with the young man.  Intimate acquaintance is perhaps too strong a term; for though Button was born in the town and had always lived there, he was more or less a stranger to those who knew him best.  Comrades he had, of course, in a manner:  the boys with whom he had formerly gone to the public school, and two or three maturer persons whose acquaintance he had contracted later in the way of trade.  But with these he could scarcely be said to be intimate.  James Dutton’s rather isolated condition was not in consequence of any morbid or uncouth streak in his mental make-up.  He was of a shy and gentle nature, and his sedentary occupation had simply let the habit of solitude and unsociability form a shell about him.  Dutton was a shoemaker and cobbler, like his father before him, plying his craft in the shabby cottage where he was born and had lived ever since, at the foot of a narrow lane leading down to the river—­a lonely, doleful sort of place, enlivened with a bit of shelving sand where an ancient fisherman occasionally came to boil lobsters.

In the open lots facing the unhinged gate was an old relinquished tannery that still flavored the air with decayed hemlock and fir bark, which lay here and there in dull-red patches, killing the grass.  The undulations of a colonial graveyard broke tamely against the western base of the house.  Head-stones and monuments—­if there had ever been any monuments—­had melted away.  Only tradition and those slowly subsiding wave-like ridges of graves revealed the character of the spot.  Within the memory of man nobody had been dropped into that Dead Sea.  The Duttons, father and son, had dwelt here nearly twenty-four years.  They owned the shanty.  The old man was now dead, having laid down his awl and lapstone just a year before the rise of those international complications which resulted in the appearance of Sergeant O’Neil in Rivermouth, where he immediately tacked up the blazoned aegis of the United States over the doorway of Dame Trippew’s little shop.