A Prairie-Schooner Princess

by Mary K. Maule

For weeks they got no nearer to war than a hot, dirty, disorderly, unsanitary camp, where they were drilled from morning till night with aching shoulders and blistered feet, marched and countermarched under a broiling sun, eating hard-tack and sow-belly, and drinking water from foul ponds and muddy streams, and sleeping in fever-ridden swamps under rain that poured down upon them continually.

For a long time Joe avoided his brother. The sight of Lige, so big and handsome in his uniform, with his bright brown eyes, his rich color, the dark curly hair that fell over his forehead under the vizor of his soldier-cap, roused in him a bitterness that he could not overcome.

The knowledge that had come upon him so suddenly was a well-established fact in his mind now. He knew that he loved Nina. Knew that he loved her with all the power and strength and passion of his young manhood. Not as a brother loves a sister, but as a man loves the one woman in all the world for him.

He could not banish her from his mind. In camp, in field, on march, standing guard in the rain at night, waiting for the signal to go into battle, her face was always before him.

It angered him to see that Lige was not suffering as he suffered. He did not appear to be eating out his heart for her. He larked and sang with the other boys (for they were boys—mere boys—these defenders of the nation's integrity), and before many weeks had passed had become one of the most popular men in the regiment.

Joe could not tell his trouble to Herbert—of whom he had grown very fond. That there had come an estrangement in his heart toward Lige, that brother who had always been almost like another self, was a thing of which he could not speak.

But Lige did not seem to notice. So far as Joe could see he treated him as he always had, with his jolly, careless affection. As soon as their drilling days were over and they were moved forward into action he seemed to become possessed with the spirit of war. The excitement, the danger, the fighting, the constant sense of adventure appealed to his spirited, adventuresome nature, and he threw himself into action with an ardor that raised him from a private to a corporal in a short time. Whatever his thoughts, whatever his emotions, Joe could see that he found no time to put them on paper or to dwell much upon them in his own mind.

Transportation was poor and the distance great, and they heard from home only at rare intervals. They had been gone two months when Joe received a small package one day, which, when he tore it open eagerly, he found to contain a daguerreotype of Nina.

Poor as was the early effort at photography, the face that smiled up at him from the shiny glass was so lovely that it caught his heart like a vise and left him gasping.

She was eighteen now—a woman! And in the proudly poised little head, the small oval face, the great violet eyes and the shining nimbus of golden hair there was that distinction that had always marked her as different from all others.