“I will go and see the General myself,” exclaimed Miss Parmalee, flushing with wrath. “I will see whether he will permit the Sanitary Commission to be affronted in this outrageous—”
She stopped short. Her indignant effort to rise to her feet had been checked by a hand on the ground, which held firmly in its grasp a fold of her skirt. She turned, pulled the cloth from the clutch of the tightened fingers, looked at the hand as it sprawled limply on the grass, and gave a little, shuddering, half-hysterical laugh. “Mercy me!” was what she said.
“You know who it is, don’t you?” asked Dwight Ransom.
The meaning in his voice struck Miss Julia, and she bent a careful scrutiny through the dusk upon the face of the man stretched out beside her. His head had slipped sidewise on the knapsack, and his bearded chin was unnaturally sunk into his collar. Through the grime on his face could be discerned an unearthly pallor. His wide-opened eyes seemed staring fixedly, reproachfully, at the hand which had lost its hold upon Miss Julia’s dress.
“It does seem as if I’d seen the face before somewhere,” she remarked, “but I don’t appear to place it. It is getting so dark, too. No, I can’t imagine. Who is it?”
She had risen to her feet and was peering down at the dead man, her pretty brows knitted in perplexity.
“He recognized you!” said Dwight, with significant gravity. “It’s Marsena Pulford.”
“Oh, poor man!” exclaimed Julia. “If he’d only spoken to me I would gladly have fanned him, too. But I was so anxious about the Colonel here that I never took a fair look at him. I dare say I shouldn’t have recognized him, even then. Beards do change one so, don’t they!”
Then she turned to Colonel Starbuck and made answer to the inquiry of his lifted eyebrows.
“The unfortunate man,” she explained, “was our village photographer. I sat to him for my picture several times. I think I have one of them over at the Commission tent now.”