“It’s Father! It’s Father!” she exclaimed, and raced down the slope to the opening in the wall that led to the highway.
CHAPTER XI
A TRIUMPHAL ARCH
The blue clad figure on horseback came on so slowly that Roxy had reached the road long before the horseman was near enough for her to be sure that it was really her long expected father; and when he drew rein and called, “Roxy!” and smiled down at her the little girl, looking up at the thin worn face, cried out: “Oh, Father! You’re sick,” and Captain Delfield nodded. “Pretty well used up, my dear. Run back to the house and tell your mother I’m coming,” and he turned his horse into the lane leading to the house while Roxy raced across the slope and ran into the house calling: “Mother! Mother! Mother!” until Mrs. Delfield and Grandma Miller both came hurrying to know what had happened.
“Father has come! Father is here!” said the little girl, rushing through the house to the yard where Jacob was tenderly helping Captain Delfield from the tired horse.
Roxy’s father was not only worn out by his long journey on horseback; he had not yet recovered from a wound received some weeks earlier on the slopes of Malvern where the Union forces had repulsed the Confederates and driven Lee’s army toward Richmond.
For the week after his arrival Captain Delfield was in bed, and Roxy spent a part of each day in the big front chamber where her father’s bed was drawn near the windows so that he could look off across the valley to the distant hills.
He wanted to hear all that she could tell him about her friend Polly and the little Hinham girls, and when she told of her discovery of the Yankee soldier who had escaped from Richmond prison he listened eagerly and smiled over Roxy’s description of Dulcie’s discovery that her food had been taken.
“Helping that boy will help win the war, Roxy; and you helped the Yankee Army without knowing it,” he said.
“But, Father, if it had been a Confederate boy I would have taken him food just the same,” Roxy responded, half fearing that her father, wounded by a Confederate bullet, might not agree with her in this; but Captain Delfield answered approvingly:
“Of course, dear child. The Confederate soldiers are a worthy foe. Of course you would have helped any starving man.”