“He didn’t! He didn’t!” again declared Roxy nearly ready to cry; for the little girl realized that the young soldier need not have been so hungry, so nearly starved, as he had declared, if he had been willing to steal food; and Roxy felt it was unfair that he should be thought a thief when she herself had taken the things. She well knew that she would be praised for carrying him the food, but her promise to the fleeing stranger that she would never tell anyone that she had seen him now prevented her from protecting his honesty.
“Why, Roxy, dear! Who else could have taken the food? He must have crept in when Dulcie was in her cabin, and when you were riding with Polly,” said Mrs. Delfield, putting her arm about her little daughter and thinking Roxy had not yet wholly recovered from her fright.
Roxy looking up met Polly’s questioning glance. “Oh! Polly looks as if she knew all about it,” she thought, wondering if it could be possible; but neither of the girls said a word as to the fact of their disagreement or that Roxy had not, after all, gone to Sharpsburg that afternoon. Dulcie had apparently forgotten Roxy’s early return, and now reminded her mistress that suppertime was well past.
“Yo’ suppah am ready. Dar ain’ so much as dar ought ter be ’count ob dat Yankee a-stealin’ ob it; but I reckons you’ll make out,” she said soberly, and Grandma Miller led the way to the dining-room.
Polly declared that she had had her supper before leaving home, but she sat at the table beside Roxy and nibbled at one of Dulcie’s cakes.
Grandma Miller spoke again of the young soldier who had caused so much excitement in her quiet home.
“He is in safety by this time; with two good horses he can soon reach Washington. I wonder if it was the Richmond prison from which he escaped?” she said thoughtfully.
“My father thought the Confederates very brave to ride on so near to Sharpsburg in search of him,” said Polly; “he says they might easily have been captured themselves by some body of Union troops on the march.”
“Oh, no one ever questions the courage of the Southern soldiers; I should not be surprised to see an army of them, with General Robert Lee at their head, come riding into Maryland any day,” said Mrs. Delfield, but little imagining that before many months her prediction was to be fulfilled, and the courageous Lee lead his brave troops to raise the standard of revolt on Northern soil, and that along those peaceful slopes and in the valley bordering the Antietam River would rage one of the fiercest and most decisive battles of the Civil War.
Nor could any one of the little group gathered that June evening about the table in the peaceful room whose windows looked off toward South Mountain imagine that the young Yankee soldier who Roxy had that day helped on his way to safety would be one of the conquering army under General McClellan.