Maybe these heads and hands, so gay to-day in their
mock fight, would be grimly and sadly at work by and by, in
real encounter with some real enemy.
"Do you see that man, Daisy?" whispered Preston suddenly in my
ear. "That one talking to a lady in blue —"
We were on the parade ground, among a crowd of spectators, for
the hotels were very full, and the Point very gay now. I said
I saw him.
"That is a great man."
"Is he?" I said, looking and wondering if a great man could
hide behind such a physiognomy.
"Other people think so, I can tell you," said Preston. "Nobody
knows what that man can do. That is Davis of Mississippi."
The name meant nothing to me then. I looked at him as I would
have looked at another man. And I did not like what I saw.
Something of sinister, nothing noble, about the countenance;
power there might be — Preston said there was — but the power
of the fox and the vulture it seemed to me; sly, crafty,
false, selfish, cruel.
"If nobody knows what he can do, how is it so certain that he
is a great man?" I asked.
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