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we noticed, they all seemed to have taken to shotguns. ‘Course, I’d heared guns round the place before, now and then—fella shooting a rabbit, maybe, or a quail—and I warn’t afraid of a gun going off at a distance, though sometimes it’d make me startle and gallop round a bit. But now there seemed to be guns out all the time, and the men kept taking ‘em to pieces and cleaning ‘em and showing ‘em to each other and talking ‘bout ‘em.
    I ‘member one mornin’ I’d been out—Andy was riding me—and we was coming back up the lane and into the big yard in front of the house. Before we ever got in the gate, I could see the yard was full of people. The men was all standing in a knot and most of the women had come out of the house, too; and some of the black folks, they was stood over to one side. There was a quiet-looking sort of a horse—a cob—between the shafts of an open cart. He was a stranger. I’d never seed him before. He was hitched by the reins to the rails, and there was a man—quite an old man—in gray clothes and a white shirt, smelling very clean, all soap and no sweat—standing up on the back of this here cart and hollering away at our people. They
liked
him—you could tell that—even though he was talking as if he was real mad. He kept waving his arms, and now and then he’d shout an’ go
thump! bang!
with his fist on the cart. And every so often, when he stopped as if he’d asked them something, our folks started in cheering and shouting “Yes! Yes! By golly we will!” and all sech things as that—much as I could understand, anyways.
    At first I thought he must have brung something to sell—we used to get folks like that sometimes—what they call peddlers, you know, Tom—and I figured old Andy’d soon be sending him ‘bout his business pretty sharp. But he didn’t. No, he got down off my back and hitched me to the rails right ‘longside this horse of the stranger’s, and then he jest stood and listened like the rest.
    I tried to make out from this old horse in the shafts what it was all about. Apparently he’d brung the man from town, and it seemed they’d been going quite a ways round the country, him talking like this everywhere they fetched up.
    â€œHe’s telling them to fight,” says this horse.
    â€œFight?” I said. “Fight who?”
    â€œI’ll be durned if I know,” says the horse. “But that’s the way I reckon it. They’ve all got to go somewhere or other to fight, that’s what he keeps saying. But what beats me is, ‘parently they all
want
to. You can tell they want to, can’t you? Jest look at ‘em. They’re all right in ‘greement with him.”
    After a while the man got through speechifying, and they all cheered even louder, and Andy and Jim and the ladies took him off with them into the big house. The way they was acting, they was going to treat him real sociable. The men was talking, too, among theirselves. I could understand some of it—mostly by the way they was behaving more’n anything else.
    â€œDurn it!” says one. “I’m going!” Another man was kind of dancing ‘bout the yard, singing
“Jine
up!
Jine
up!” and slapping the others on their backs. After a time they told one of the black fellas to lead me away and unsaddle me, so I never seed what happened when the old town man left.
    Soon after that, there commenced a kind of a bustle bout the place. It was like when we was going off to the fair the summer before, only this time a whole lot more was going on. First off, a lot of our horses was sold—more’n I’d ever seed go at one time before. Usually, horses was sold in ones or twos, often to fellas who came regular. I’d got to know some of them by sight.
    But now, all sorts of strangers seemed to be coming