country. But I don't have to venerate him and fuss over him and
listen to him. I'm a Yankee, thank the Lord!" Devore came from Michigan
and had worked on papers in Cleveland and Detroit before he drifted
South. "Oh, we've got his counterpart up my way," he went on. "Up there
he'd be a pension-grabbing old kicker, ready to have a fit any time
anybody wearing a gray uniform got within ninety miles of him, and
writing red-hot letters of protest to the newspapers every time the
state authorities sent a captured battle flag back down South. Down here
he's a pompous, noisy old fraud, too proud to work for a living--or too
lazy--and too poor to count for anything in this world. The difference
is that up in my country we've squelched the breed--we got good and
tired of these professional Bloody Shirt wavers a good while ago; but
here you fuss over this man, and you'll sit round and pretend to listen
while he drools away about things that happened before any one of you
was born. Do you fellows know what I've found out about your Major
Putnam Stone? He's a life member of the Shawnee Club--a life member,
mind you! And here I've been living in this town over a year, and nobody
ever so much as invited me inside its front door!"

All of which was, perhaps, true, even though Devore had an unnecessarily
harsh way of stating the case; the part about the Shawnee Club was true,
at any rate, and I used to think it possibly had something to do with
Devore's feelings for Major Stone. Not that Devore gave open utterance
to his feelings to the major's face. To the major he was always silently
polite, with a little edging of ice on his politeness; he saved up his
spleen to spew it out behind the old fellow's back. Farther than that he
couldn't well afford to go anyhow. The Chief, owner of the paper and its
editor, was the major's friend. As for the major himself, he seemed
never to notice Devore's attitude. For a fact, I believe he actually
felt a sort of pity for Devore, seeing that Devore had been born in the
North. Not to have been born in the South was, from the major's way of
looking at the thing, a great and regrettable misfortune for which the
victim could not be held responsible, since the fault lay with his
parents and not with him. By way of a suitable return for this, Devore
spent many a spare moment thinking up grotesque yet wickedly
appropriate nicknames for the major. He called him Old First and Second
Manassas and Old Hardee's Tac