Despite his years, his face was as keen and eager as that of any boy.
"Who is he ?" Harry whispered to St.Clair, who knew everybody.
"His name's Ruffin, but he's not a South Carolinian.

He's a Virginian, but he has come to join us, and he's heart and soul with us.

He's ready to fight at the drop of a hat." Harry--their battery stood on Coming's Point--glanced toward the city and uttered a low cry of surprise.
"Look!" he said to his friends, "all Charleston is here." "Yes, and a lot more of South Carolina, too," said St.Clair.
The people, learning the meaning of those signal guns in the night, were packed in every open space, and the very roofs were black with them.

Forty or fifty thousand, men, women and children, were looking on, but nothing more than a murmur ran through the great mass.

Harry knew that every heart in the fifty thousand beat, like his own, with strained expectancy.
A great gun in the battery was trained upon Sumter, and the gunner stood ready at the lanyard, but the old man with the long white hair and the keen, eager face, stepping forward, begged General Beauregard to allow him the honor of firing the first shot.