Gant, during these years in which Helen and Luke, the two for whom he felt the deepest affection, were absent a large part of the time, lived a splintered existence at home and at Eliza’s. He feared and hated a lonely life, but habit was deeply rooted in him, and he was unwilling to exchange the well-used comfort of his own home for the bald wintriness of Eliza’s. She did not want him. She fed him willingly enough, but his tirades and his nightly sojourns, both longer and more frequent now that his daughter was absent, annoyed her more than they ever had before.
“You have a place of your own,” she cried fretfully. “Why don’t you stay in it? I don’t want you around making trouble.”
“Send him on,” he moaned bitterly. “Send him on. Over the stones rattle his bones, he’s only a beggar that nobody owns. Ah, Lord! The old drayhorse has had its day. Its race is run. Kick him out: the old cripple can no longer provide them with victuals, and they will throw him on the junkheap, unnatural and degenerate monsters that they are.”
But he remained at Dixieland as long as there was any one to listen to him, and to the bleak little group of winter boarders he brought magic. They fed hungrily on all the dramatic gusto with which, lunging back and forth in the big rocker, before the blazing parlor fire, he told and retold the legends of his experience, taking, before their charmed eyes, an incident that had touched him romantically, and embellishing, weaving and building it up. A whole mythology grew up as, goggle-eyed, they listened:
General Fitzhugh Lee, who had reined up before the farmer boy and asked for a drink of water, now tossed off an oaken bucketful, questioned him closely concerning the best roads into Gettysburg, asked if he had seen detachments of the enemy, wrote his name down in a small book, and went off saying to his
