Down on the parade-ground Beverly Clarenden and Mat Nivers were sitting
with their feet crossed under them, tailor fashion, facing each other
and talking earnestly. Over by the fort, Esmond Clarenden stood under a
big elm-tree. A round little, stout little man he was, whose sturdy
strength and grace of bearing made up for his lack of height. Like a
great green tent the boughs of the elm, just budding into leaf, drooped
over him. A young army officer on a cavalry horse was talking with him
as we came up.

"Run over there to Beverly now. Gail," my uncle said, with a wave of his
hand.

I was always in awe of shoulder-straps, so I scampered away toward the
children. But not until, child-like, I had stared at the three men long
enough to take a child's lasting estimate of things.

I carry still the keen impression of that moment when I took,
unconsciously, the measure of the three: the mounted army man, commander
of the fort, big in his official authority and force; Jondo on his great
black horse, to me the heroic type of chivalric courage; and between the
two, Esmond Clarenden, unmounted, with feet firmly planted, suggesting
nothing heroic, nothing autocratic. And yet, as he stood there,
square-built, solid, certain, he seemed in some dim way to be the real
man of whom the other two were but shadows. It took a quarter of a
century for me to put into words what I learned with one glance that day
in my childhood.

As I came running toward the parade-ground Beverly Clarenden called out:

"Come here, Gail! Shut your little mouth and open your big ears, and