"An' do you love him—like I love Gen'ral Lee?"
"Yes, dear," he answered earnestly; "of course."
He wondered again to see her turn away in sober thought, tracing lines on the dusty floor with one small brown toe; for the child was wrestling with a problem. If a soldier had orders from his general, as she herself might put it, "he was bound to come"; but still it was hard to reconcile such duty with the capture of her father. Therefore, she raised her tiny chin and resorted to tactics of a purely personal nature:
"An' didn't you know, if you hurt my daddy, I'd tell Uncle Fitz Lee on you?"
"No," the Yankee smiled. "Is he your uncle?"
The littlest rebel regarded him with a look of positive pity for his ignorance.
"He's everybody's uncle," she stated warmly. "An' if I was to tell him, he'd come right after you an'—an' lick the stuffins out of you."
The soldier laughed.
"My dear," he confided, with a dancing twinkle in hip eye, "to tell you the honest truth, your Uncle Fitz has done it already—several times."
"Has he?" she cried, in rapturous delight. "Oh, has he?"