"Oh, Daddy, where is it?" she asked him happily, once more reaching for the pocket. "'Cause I'm so hungry for somethin' good."
"Don't! Don't!" he cried, as he drew his coat away, roughly, fiercely, in the pain of unselfish suffering. "For Daddy's sake, don't!"
"Why, what is it, Daddy," she asked, in her shrillness of a child's alarm, her eyes on the widening stain of red above his waist. "Is—is it hurtin' you again? What is it, Daddy-man?"
"Your bundle," he answered, in the flat, dull tone of utter hopelessness. "I lost it, Virgie. I lost it."
"Oh," she said, with a quaver of disappointment, which she vainly strove to hide. "How did you do it?"
For a moment the man leaned limply against a chair-back, hiding his eyes with one trembling hand; then he spoke in shamed apology:
"I—I couldn't help it, darling; because, you see, I hadn't any powder left; and I was coming through the woods—just as I told you—when the Yanks got sight of me." He smiled down at her bravely, striving to add a dash of comedy to his tragic plight. "And I tell you, Virgie, your old dad had to run like a turkey—wishing to the Lord he had wings, too."
Virgie did not smile in turn, and her father dropped back into his former tone, his pale lips setting in a straight, hard line.
"And then—the blue boy I was telling you about—when he shot at me, I must have stumbled, because, when I scrambled up, I—I couldn't see just right; so I ran and ran, thinking of you, darling, and wanting to get to you before—well, before it was breakfast time. I had your bundle in my pocket; but when I fell—why, Virgie, don't you see?—I—I couldn't go back and find it." He paused to choke, then spoke between his teeth, in fury at a strength which had failed to breast a barrier of fate: "But I would have gone back, if I'd had any powder left. I would have! I would!"
A pitiful apology it was, from a man to a little child; a story told only in its hundredth part, for why should he give its untold horrors to a baby's ears? How could she understand that man-hunt in the early dawn? The fugitive—with an empty pistol on his hip—wading swamps and plunging through the tangled underbrush; alert and listening, darting from tree to tree where the woods were thin; crouching behind some fallen log to catch his laboring breath, then rising again to creep along his way. He did not tell of the racking pain in his weary legs, nor the protest of his pounding heart—the strain—the agony—the puffs of smoke that floated above the pines, and the ping of bullets whining through the trees. He did not tell of the ball that slid along his ribs, leaving a fiery, aching memory behind, as the man crashed down a clay bank, to lie for an instant in a crumpled heap, to rise and stumble on—not toward the haven of his own Confederate lines, but forward, to where a baby waited—through a dancing mist of red.