“But, I want to tell you,” she said gravely in a moment, “they can say all they like about your great-uncle Rance, but he was always an upright and honest man. He had a good heart,” she said quietly, and in these words there was an accolade. “He was always willin’ to do anything he could to help people when they needed it. And he wouldn’t wait to be asked, neither! Why, didn’t they tell it how he practically carried Dave Ingram on his back as they retreated from Antietam, rather than let him lay there and be taken!—Of course, he was strong—why, strong as a mule!” she cried. “He could stand anything.—They told it how he could march all day long, and then stay up all night nursin’ the sick and tendin’ to the wounded.”
She paused and shook her head. “I guess he’d seen some awful things,” she said. “I reckon he’d been with many a poor feller when he breathed his last—they had to admit it, sir, when they came back! Now, they can laugh at him all they please, but they had to give him his due! Jim Alexander said, you know, he admitted it, ‘Well, Rance has preached the comin’ of the Lord and a better day upon the earth, and I reckon we’ve all laughed at him at times for doin’ it—but let me tell you, now,’ he says, ‘he always practiced what he preached. If everybody had as good a heart as he’s got, we’d have that better day he talks about right now!’”
She sewed quietly for a moment, thrusting the needle through with her thimbled finger, drawing the thread through with a strong, pulling movement of her arm.
“Now, child, I’m goin’ to tell you something,” she said quietly. “There are a whole lot of people in this world who think they’re pretty smart—but they never find out anything. Now I suppose that there are lots of smarter people in the world than Rance—I guess they looked on him as sort of simple-minded—but let me tell you something! It’s not always the smartest people who know the most—and there are things I could tell you—things I know about!” she whispered with an omened tone, then fell to shaking her head slightly again, her face contracted in a portentous movement—“Child! Child!…I don’t know what you’d call it…what explanation you could give for it—but it’s mighty strange when you come to think about it, isn’t it?”
“But what? What is it, Aunt Maw?” he demanded feverishly.
She turned and looked him full in the face for a moment. Then she whispered:
“He’s been—Seen!…I Saw him once myself!…He’s been Seen all through his life,” she whispered again. “I know a dozen people who have Seen him,” she added quietly. She stitched in silence for a time.