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.
Suddenly she started forward, almost ran across the few yards of floor, and, throwing herself down in the darkest corner, where only dimly one could see an old buffalo-robe spread over a heap of staves, began sobbing as if her heart must break.
Her dress had brushed over the stove-pipe, and scattered some of the embers beyond the sheet of tin it stood on. I stamped these out, and carried the other remnants of the fire out doors. Then I returned, and stood about in the smoky little shop, quite helplessly listening to the moans and convulsive sobs which rose from the obscure corner. A bit of a candle in a bottle stood on the shelf by the window. I lighted this, but it hardly seemed to improve the situation. I could see her now, as well as hear her—huddled face downward upon the skin, her whole form shaking with the violence of her grief. I had never been so unhappy before in my life.
At last—it may not have been very long, but it seemed hours—there rose the sound of voices outside on the road. A wagon had stopped, and some words were being exchanged. One of the voices grew louder—came nearer; the other died off, ceased altogether, and the wagon could be heard driving away. On the instant the door was pushed sharply open, and “Jee” Hagadorn stood on the threshold, surveying the interior of his cooper-shop with gleaming eyes.
He looked at me; he looked at his daughter lying in the corner; he looked at the charred mess on the floor—yet seemed to see nothing of what he looked at. His face glowed with a strange excitement—which in another man I should have set down to drink.
“Glory be to God! Praise to the Most High! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” he called out, stretching forth his hands in a rapturous sort of gesture I remembered from class-meeting days.