t
would be charity. My pencils and shoestrings and collar buttons and coat
hangers keep me in spending money. I couldn't take charity even from you
men. And Jasper's money," the gray poll wagged, and he cried, "Oh,
no--not Ahab Wright's and Kyle Perry's--not that money. Kenyon is
forever slipping me fifty. But I don't need it. John Dexter keeps a room
always ready for me, and I like it at the Dexters' almost as much as I
do at the county home. So I don't really need Kenyon's money, however
much joy he takes in giving it. And I raise the devil's own fuss to keep
him from doing it."

The Doctor puffed, and the Captain in his regal garments paraded the
long room, with his hands locked under his coattails.

"But, Amos," cried the Captain, "under the law, no man wearing that
button," and the Captain looked at the tri-color of the Loyal Legion,
proudly adorning the shiny coat, "no soldier under the law, has to go
out there. They've got to keep you here in town, and besides you're
entitled to a whopping lot of pension money for all these unclaimed
years."

The white old head shook and the pursed old lips smiled, as the thin
little voice replied, "Not yet, Ezra--not yet--I don't need the pension
yet. And as for the Home--it's not lonesome there. A lot of 'em are
bedfast and stricken and I get a certain amount of fun--chirping 'em up
on cloudy days. They like to hear from Emerson and John A. Logan, and
Sitting Bull and Huxley and their comrades. So I guess I'm being more or
less useful." He stroked his scraggy beard and looked at the fire. "And
then," he added, "she always seems nearer where there is sorrow. Grant,
too, is that way, though neither of 'em really has come."

The Captain finding that his money was ashes in his hands, and not
liking the thought and meditation of death, changed the subject, and
when the evening was old, Amos Adams called a taxi-cab, and at the
county's expense rode home.

At the end of a hard winter day, descending tardily into the early
spring, they missed him at the farm. No one knew whether he had gone to
visit the Dexters, as was his weekly wont, or whether he was staying
with Captain Morton in town, where he sometimes spent Saturday night
after the Grand Army meeting.

The next day the sun came out and melted the untimely snow banks. And
some country boys playing by a limestone ledge in a wide upland meadow
above the Wahoo, far from the smoke of town, came upon the body of an
old man. Be