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effort and she needed my support. We approached her room in silence. William opened the door, showed her in, and set up her suitcases.
    “The maid can assist you in unpacking if you’d like,” the butler said. “Dinner will be served at seven. If that will be all, ma’am?”
    “Yes, thank you,” Mrs. Triggs said.
    “Is there anything you need, Mrs. Triggs, I mean Priscilla?” I said. I resented Sir Arthur offering my services first as hostess, now as a housekeeper or maid, but both my loyalty to him and the familiarity this woman imposed upon me compelled me to inquire.
    “No, it’s too late for me, Hattie,” she said, pulling the drape back from the window. A delivery wagon laden down with pine trees piled several feet high rumbled past in the street below. “It’s just too late.” I glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was only half past five.
    What does she mean by that? I wondered as I slipped out the door and hastily closed it behind me.

C HAPTER 5
    “I t was the greatest adventure of our lives,” a man with only one leg and a long, flowing white beard said. Every head in the room, with the exception of mine and Sir Arthur’s, nodded in solemn agreement.
    “I’ll never forget the time I got up to water the trees in the middle of a moonless night,” the one-legged man said. “Just as I finished up and turned around, I bumped right into a rebel, I did. Must of been a scout or something. Well, I be damned if I didn’t pull up my britches and run as fast as I could go. I looked back once, trying not to get shot, and wouldn’t you know, the damn reb was running the other way!” He slapped his one knee and let out a loud guffaw, spreading laughter through the room.
    What was Sir Arthur thinking, bringing me here? I wondered.
    When Sir Arthur, Lieutenant Morgan Triggs, and I had arrived at the monthly meeting of the #502 Edward D. Kittoe Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, otherwise known as the G.A.R., heads weren’t nodding, but beards were wagging and eyes were raised. Women were not allowed at the meetings and my presence set the men, mostly feeble old men, into passionate complaints. But Sir Arthur had been asked to attend as a special guest, and with General Starrett’s assurances, for he was the Senior Vice Commander of the post, I was allowed to stay and take notes as long as I sat in the shadowed corner and didn’t speak. As the one-legged man’s tale attested, the men quickly forgot I was in the room at all. At least most of the men. In an attempt to shield myself from the coarse men, I vainly buried myself in my shorthand. It didn’t work.
    “Who can forget the ‘horizontal entertainment’? ” another man added, chuckling.
    Horizontal entertainment? I wondered as several men shouted, “Hear, hear!”
    One of the men, with a scruffy gray mustache and several moles on his cheek, looked directly at me and winked. I dropped my gaze, tugged my hat down as far as it would go, and pressed my back against the wall. A moth landed on my tablet, methodically searching the paper for food. When I shooed it away, the man with the moles was still staring at me. I didn’t look up again.
    After taking roll call, which I had dutifully captured in my notebook, the Post Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Issac Holbrook, a tall, elderly man with thick white hair that protruded from his head and ran in various directions, read the minutes of the last meeting, including a description of the “sham battle” the men put on for the town. He then reminded everybody of the “Great Men of Galena” house tour scheduled for tomorrow that was organized by the G.A.R. specifically for Sir Arthur, though everyone was invited to attend. Then General Starrett officially introduced Sir Arthur, who in turn introduced his guest, Lieutenant Triggs. The general had allowed Sir Arthur a few minutes to speak to the group. Sir Arthur described his purpose for moving to Galena and then asked if anyone was willing to tell