"Morning, miss," said Steve. "Could you spare a poor sick soldier a bite to eat?"
He ended with a hollow groan and the weight of his body against the lintel. The young woman dragged forward a split-bottomed armchair. "Sit right down there! Of course I'll give you something to eat. It ain't anything catching, is it?"
Steve sank into the chair. "It was pneumonia, and my strength ain't come back yet."
"I only asked because I have to think of my baby." She glanced toward a cradle by the window. "Pneumonia is dreadful weakening! How come they let you march?"
"Why, I didn't," said Steve, "want to be left behind. I wanted to be in the fight with the rest of the boys. So the captain said, says he, 'Well, you can try it, for we need all the good fighters we've got, but if you find you're too weak to go on, fall out! Maybe some good Seraphim will give you 'commodation—'"
"I can't give you 'commodation, because there's just the baby and myself, James being with Ashby. But I can give you dinner (I haven't got much, but what I've got you're quite welcome to). You kin rest here till evening. Maybe a wagon'll come along and give you a lift, so's you can get there in time—"
"Get where, ma'am?"
"Why, wherever the battle's going to be!"
"Yaas, yaas," said Steve. "It's surely hard lines when those who kin fight have to take a back seat 'cause of illness and watch the other kind go front!" He groaned again and closed his eyes. "I don't suppose you've got a drop of spirits handy?"
The woman—she was hardly more than a girl—hesitated. Because the most were heroic, and for the sake of that most, all Confederate soldiers wore the garland. It was not in this or any year of the war that Confederate women lightly doubted the entire heroism of the least of individuals, so that he wore the grey. It was to them, most nobly, most pathetically, a sacred investiture. Priest without but brute within, wolf in shepherd's clothing, were to them not more unlooked-for nor abhorrent than were coward, traitor, or shirk enwrapped in the pall and purple of the grey. Fine lines came into the forehead of the girl standing between Steve and the hearth. She remembered suddenly that James had said there were plenty of scamps in the army and that not every straggler was lame or ill. Some were plain deserters.