She seemed unable to reply.

A cannoneer said respectfully:

"Reckon the li'l gal's jes' natch'ally skeered o' we-uns, Major, seein'

how the caval'y ketched her paw down thar in the crick."

The Major said briefly:

"Your father is a Union man, but nobody is going to hurt him. I'd send you to the rear, too, but there's no time now. Please go in and shut that door. I'll see that nobody disturbs you."

As she was closing the door the young Major called after her:

"Where's the well?"

As she did not know she only stared at him as though terrified.

"All right," he said, more gently. "Don't be frightened. I'll come back and talk to you in a little while."

As she shut the door she saw the cannon at the pass limber up, wheel, and go bumping up the hill to rejoin its bespattered fellows on the knoll.

An artilleryman came along and dropped a bundle of picks and shovels which he was carrying to the gunners, who had begun the emplacements; the boyish Major dismounted, subduing his excitement with a dignified frown; and for a while he was very fussy and very busy, aiding the battery captain in placing the guns and verifying the depression.

The position of the masked battery was simply devilish; every gun, hidden completely in the oak-scrub, was now trained on the pass.

Opposite, across the stream, long files of gray infantry were moving to cover among the trees; behind, a battalion arrived to support the guns; below, the cavalry had begun to leave the pass; troopers, dismounted, were carefully removing from the road all traces of their arrival.

Leaning there by the window, the Special Messenger counted the returning fours as troop after troop retired southward and disappeared around the bend of the road.

For a while the picks and shovels of the gunners sounded noisily; concealed riflemen, across the creek, were also busy intrenching. But by noon all sound had ceased in the sunny ravine; there was nothing to be seen from below; not a human voice echoed; not a pick-stroke; only the sweet, rushing sound of the stream filled the silence; only the shadows of the branches moved.

Warned again by the sentinels to close the battered window and keep the door shut, she still watched the gunners, through the dirty window panes, where they now lay under the bushes beside their guns. There was no conversation among them; some of the artillerymen seemed to be asleep; some sprawled belly-deep in the ferns, chewing twigs or idly scraping holes in the soil; a few lay about, eating the remnants of the morning's scanty rations, chewing strips of bacon rind, and licking the last crumbs from the palms of their grimy hands.

Along the bush-hidden parapet of earth, heaps of ammunition lay--cannister and common shell. She recognized these, and, with a shudder, a long row of smaller projectiles on which soldiers were screwing copper caps--French hand grenades, brought in by blockade runners, and fashioned to explode on impact--so close was to be the coming slaughter of her own people in the road below.

Toward one o'clock the gunners were served noon rations. She watched them eating for a while, then, nerveless, turned back into the single room of the cabin and opened the rear door--so gently and noiselessly that the boyish staff-major who was seated on the sill did not glance around until she spoke, asking his permission to remain there.

"You mustn't open that door," he said, looking up, surprised by the sweetness of the voice which he heard now for the first time.

"How can anybody see me from the pass?" she asked innocently. "That is what you are afraid of, isn't it?"

He shot a perplexed and slightly suspicious glance at her, then the frowning importance faded from his beardless face; he bit a piece out of the soggy corncake he was holding and glanced up at her again, amiably conscious of her attractions; besides, her voice and manner had been a revelation. Evidently her father had had her educated at some valley school remote from these raw solitudes.

So he smiled at her, quite willing to be argued with and entertained; and at his suggestion she shyly seated herself on the sill outside in the sunlight.

"Have you lived here long?" he asked encouragingly.

"Not very," she said, eyes downcast, her clasped hands lying loosely over one knee. The soft, creamy-tinted fingers occupied his attention for a moment; the hand resembled the hand of "quality"; so did the ankle and delicate arch of her naked foot, half imprisoned in the coarse shoe under her skirt's edge.

He had often heard that some of these mountaineers had pretty children; here, evidently, was a most fascinating example.

"Is your mother living?" he asked pleasantly.

"No, sir."

He thought to himself that she must resemble her dead mother, because the man whom the cavalry had caught in the creek was a coarse-boned, red-headed ruffian, quite impossible to reconcile as the father of this dark-haired, dark-eyed, young forest creature, with her purely-molded limbs and figure and sensitive fashion of speaking. He turned to her curiously:

"So you have not always lived here on the mountain."

"No, not always."

"I suppose you spent a whole year away from home at boarding-school," he suggested with patronizing politeness.

"Yes, six years at Edgewood," she said in a low voice.

"What?" he exclaimed, repeating the name of the most fashionable Southern institute for young ladies. "Why, I had a sister there--Margaret Kent. Were _you_ there? And did you ever--er--see my sister?"

"I knew her," said the Special Messenger absently.

He was very silent for a while, thinking to himself.

"It must have been her mother; that measly old man we caught in the creek is 'poor white' all through." And, munching thoughtfully again on his soggy corncake, he pondered over the strange fate of this fascinating young girl, fashioned to slay the hearts of Southern chivalry--so young, so sweet, so soft of voice and manner, condemned to live life through alone in this shaggy solitude--fated, doubtless, to mate with some loose, lank, shambling, hawk-eyed rustic of the peaks--doomed to bear sickly children, and to fade and dry and wither in the full springtide of her youth and loveliness.

"It's too bad," he said fretfully, unconscious that he spoke aloud, unaware, too, that she had risen and was moving idly, with bent head, among the weeds of the truck garden--edging nearer, nearer, to a dark, round object about the size of a small apple, which had rolled into a furrow where the ground was all cut up by the wheel tracks of artillery and hoofs of heavy horses.

There was scarcely a chance that she could pick it up unobserved; her ragged skirts covered it; she bent forward as though to tie her shoe, but a sentinel was watching her, so she straightened up carelessly and stood, hands on her hips, dragging one foot idly to and fro, until she had covered the small, round object with sand and gravel.

That object was a loaded French hand grenade, fitted with percussion primer; and it lay last at the end of a long row of similar grenades along the shaded side of the house.

The sentry in the bushes had been watching her; and now he came out along the edge of the laurel tangle, apparently to warn her away, but seeing a staff officer so near her he halted, satisfied that authority had been responsible for her movements. Besides, he had not noticed that a grenade was missing; neither had the major, who now rose and sauntered toward her, balancing his field glasses in one hand.

"There's ammunition under these bushes," he said pleasantly; "don't go any nearer, please. Those grenades _might_ explode if anyone stumbled over them. They're bad things to handle."

"Will there be a battle here?" she asked, recoiling from the deadly little bombs.

The Major said, stroking the down on his short upper lip:

"There will probably be a skirmish. I do not dare let you leave this spot till the first shot is fired. But as soon as you hear it you had better run as fast as you can"--he pointed with his field glasses--"to that little ridge over there, and lie down behind the rocks on the other side. Do you understand?"

"Yes--I think so."

"And you'll lie there very still until it is--over?"

"I understand. May I go immediately and hide there?"

"Not yet," he said gently.

"Why?"