She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughing way: “I’ve been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it’s the worst kind of a failure. I’ve watched ’Ni’ do it a hundred times, but with me it always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn is too old now, anyway. At all events, it’s tougher than Pharaoh’s heart.”
She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemly roasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it with the grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sections showed where she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience to her “See if you don’t think it’s too old,” I took a diffident bite, at a respectful distance from the marks of her experiments. It was the worst I had ever tasted.
“I came over to see if you’d heard anything—any news,” I said, desiring to get away from the corn subject.
“You mean about Tom?” she asked, moving so that she might see me more plainly.
I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. “Our Jeff, I mean,” I made answer.
“His name is Thomas Jefferson. We call him Tom,” she explained; “that other name is too horrid. Did—did his people tell you to come and ask me?”
I shook my head. “Oh, no!” I replied with emphasis, implying by my tone, I dare say, that they would have had themselves cut up into sausage-meat first.
The girl walked past me to the door, and out to the road-side, looking down toward the bridge with a lingering, anxious gaze. Then she came back, slowly.
“No, we have no news!” she said, with an effort at calmness. “He wasn’t an officer, that’s why. All we know is that the brigade his regiment is in lost 141 killed, 560 wounded, and 38 missing. That’s all!” She stood in the doorway, her hands clasped tight, pressed against her bosom.
“That’s all!” she repeated, with a choking voice.