"and Aunt Jenny, speaking always of Jeb Stuart as Mister Stuart, told her story . . . [when it was done] They sat quietly for a time, in the firelight. The flames leaped and popped on the hearth and sparks soared in wild swirling plumes up the chimney, and Bayard Sartoris' brief career swept like a shooting star across the dark plain of their mutual remembering and suffering, lighting it with a transient glare like a soundless thunder-clap, leaving a sort of radiance when it died" (22).
The reader must penetrate Bayard's "shooting star" and see it for what it is: an immature and reckless act (returning to a Yankee camp alone to capture a jar of anchovies and getting shot) perpetrated by an immature and reckless young man.