"It's time for me to be goin'," remarked the sergeant, with a sudden accession of shamefacedness following his confidences.
"And I'm thinkin'," called out Kaintuck after him as he strode away, "that little rebel widder is goin' to git a mighty good feller for a husband!"
For four or five days the sergeant was too busy to go near the prison, but one evening at nightfall, as he was trudging along to his quarters, some one hailed him. It was the chaplain, a small, meek man, as brave as a lion. He and the sergeant had seen service together.
"Is that Sergeant Heywood?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," answered the sergeant, touching his cap.
"There's a poor fellow down at the jail"—everybody called Kaintuck a poor fellow—"who has been asking for you. He's going to die, I think."
The sergeant started. Who ever bestowed kindness and care on a prisoner that did not come to love him finally? "Why, sir?" asked the sergeant, after a pause. "What's the matter with him, sir?"
"Nothing—but death. He is rather an extraordinary fellow. His determination to live brought him through enough to kill ten men. A day or two ago he got a letter, and since then he seems equally determined to die. These cases are not so uncommon, after all. Did you never hear how easily a great strapping Russian soldier dies of homesickness or disappointment—any little thing that takes away the desire of living?"
"May be it's the Russian doctors, sir," replied the sergeant quite gravely. Fear of shot and shell he knew not, but he had been seen to turn pale at the sight of the surgeon's scalpel, and to have crawled out to parade with a shaking ague on him rather than encounter a visit from that same surgeon.