Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/28

 didn't stop to explain!" He found a relief in this fine sarcasm, and then said:

"Aren't you going to do anything?"

"Well," said my grandfather, with an irresolution quite uncommon in him, "I suppose I really ought to do something. But I don't know just what to do." He sat up, and looked about all over the room. "You don't see the marshal, do you?"

Uncle John Brand was looking at him now in disgust.

"Just look outside there, will you, John," my grandfather went on, "and see if you can find him? If you do, send him in, and I'll speak to him and have him go after the prisoner."

Uncle John Brand of Kentucky stood a moment in the doorway, finding no words with which to express himself, and then went out. And when he had gone my grandfather leaned back in his chair and laughed and laughed; laughed until his ruddy face became much redder than it was even from the heat of that day.

II

Now that I have set down, with such particularity, an incident which I could not wholly understand nor reconcile with the established order of things until many years after, I am not so sure after all that I witnessed it in that Urbana of reality; it may have been in that Urbana of the memory, wherein related scenes and incidents have coalesced with the witnessed event, or in that Macochee of