Chad thought for a minute. "Will it keep me from gittin' to be a BIG man?"

"Yes."

Chad quietly threw his quid into the fire.

"Well, I be damned," said the Major under his breath. "Are you goin' to quit?"

"Yes, sir."

Meanwhile, the old driver, whose wife lived on the next farm, was telling the
servants over there about the queer little stranger whom his master had picked
up on the road that day, and after Chad was gone to bed, the Major got out
some old letters from a chest and read them over again. Chadwick Buford was
his great-grandfather's twin brother, and not a word had been heard of him
since the two had parted that morning on the old Wilderness Road, away back in
the earliest pioneer days. So, the Major thought and thought
suppose--suppose? And at last he got up and with an uplifted candle, looked a
long while at the portrait of his grandfather that hung on the southern wall.
Then, with a sudden humor, he carried the light to the room where the boy was
in sound sleep, with his head on one sturdy arm, his hair loose on the pillow,
and his lips slightly parted and showing his white, even teeth; he looked at
the boy a long time and fancied he could see some resemblance to the portrait
in the set of the mouth and the nose and the brow, and he went back smiling at
his fancies and thinking--for the Major was sensitive to the claim of any drop
of the blood in his own veins--no matter how diluted. He was a handsome little
chap.

"How strange! How strange!"