“Go on,” she said softly, and he went on: “I changed clothes as he told me and prayed that his folks might find him and bring him to you and that I might get here, too, and not be taken prisoner, and I have, but the way was so long and hard and I am so tired and sick and sorry. You won’t let them get me, sure?”
“Never!” and Fan made me think of some wild animal guarding its young, as she drew the sheet over the boy, whose mind began to wander and from whom we could extract but little more and that little was very unsatisfactory.
It was Fan who talked most with him and who asked him his name.
“My real one, or the one I had with the boys?” he said, and she replied, “your real one, so I can write to your mother.”
There was a look of cunning in his bright eyes, as he replied, “I hain’t no mother, except Aunt Martha, and she won’t care, and I don’t want her to know. I ran away from her and enlisted after a while. I was Joe with the boys, but that ain’t the name they gave me in baptism. Do you know the Apostles?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I am one of them. Now guess,” he said, and beginning with Matthew and ending with Paul Fan went over the entire list, but the expression of the boy’s face never changed in the least; nor did he give any sign when she spoke his name, if she did speak it.
“Joe will do,” he said. “Aunt Martha has washed her hands of me a good many times. She was always washing them. She don’t mind whether I am Joe or an Apostle.”
“But where is your home? Where does Aunt Martha live?” Fan asked, and he replied, “She don’t live there now.”
Evidently he did not care to talk of his home, which could not have been a very happy one, judging from what he did say. He called me Ann-an-Fan, while Fan was Fan-an-Ann, and his eyes brightened when she came near him, and he smiled upon her in a way which always brought the tears.