Just then the battery advanced with its colors flying. Looking up the little girl recognized the Confederate battle banner and said: “That’s my kind of a flag. I don’t like that ugly other striped thing.”
Manifestly the child was without protectors. We adopted her in the name of the battery.
When we returned to the camp several serious questions arose. Jack Hawkins, one of the ex-circus clowns of the battery, suggested that first of all we must secure a chaperone for her. When asked what he meant by that, he said with lordly superiority: “Well, you see, chaperone is French for nurse. We want a nurse for this little child.”
“Nonsense,” said Denton, the other ex-circus clown, “you don’t know any more about the proprieties than you do about French. Chaperone means somebody to look after a church, and this little girl isn’t even a chapel. We’ll look after her, and we don’t want no nurse to help.”
The captain, with his long beard, was holding the little child in his arms all this time, and she suddenly turned around to him and seizing his beard said: “I like your big whiskers. They are like my papa’s. You don’t bite, because you’ve got hair on your face?”
“No, dear,” he replied, “I don’t bite such as you.”
But he was very much given to biting, all the same—as the enemy had more than once found out.
“First of all,” said Denton, who was nothing if not practical, “the little girl’s got to have some clothes.”
Denton was a tailor, as well as a clown, and naturally his thoughts were the first to run in that groove.
“I ain’t much used to making girl’s clothes, but a tailor’s a tailor, and if anybody’ll provide me the materials, I’ll undertake to fix up some gowns for her.”