He lifted her foot up tenderly and examined it with care. "My, my!" he murmured. "You poor little soldier. If I hadn't looked around that time I expect you'd been willing to walk all the way to Richmond on a foot that would make a whole regiment straggle. Just see where you've cut it—right under the second little piggie. We'll have to tie it right up and keep the bothersome old dust from getting in. By morning you'll hardly feel it."
With a soldier's readiness he opened his coat and began to tear a strip from his shirt from which to make a bandage. But his small daughter interrupted him with a vigorous protest.
"Wait!" she cried, with a face full of alarm at the willful destruction of his garment. "Don't do that. Here! You can take it off my petticoat."
"That petticoat," her father laughed, with the first real mirth she had heard for many weeks. "That poor little petticoat wouldn't make an arm bandage for Susan Jemima. Now—up with your hoofie and let's play I'm a surgeon and you're a brave soldier who has fought in every battle since we first made the Yanks skedaddle at Bull Run."
With the painful foot securely bandaged the little girl gave herself up to thought, emerging from her study at last to ask what was an all-important question.
"Daddy—"
"Yes?"
"Do you reckon, by the time the war is over, we could call Susan Jemima a vet'ran?"
"I should say we could," the father agreed heartily, without the symptom of a smile. "Hasn't she grown bald in the service? And hasn't she almost lost an arm—or is it a leg I see dangling so terribly? I'll tell you what we'll do! We'll give her an honorable discharge—and decorate her. How's that?"
"Oh, fine!" she cried, clapping her hands with delight at the fantasy. "And we'll get that Yankee man to write her a pass just like mine. Do you hear that, Cap'n Susan," she crooned to the doll, unconscious of the convulsion of silent amusement beside her. "When we get to Richmon'—if we ever do get there—I'm going to make you a uniform!"