Dick blushed and demurred. A shawl like that was too much—it was a princely gift, a fortune.
“I can’t let you go back to camp in this thin jacket,” she said, “while I have this shawl. It is serving our country, lieutenant, while it protects her soldier from the cold. I may need it? No, no, I can get others where this one came from.”
There was nothing for him to do but to accept it. He looked at me with something of his old humor in his eyes as he started off.
“I’ll be sure to come to see you again, Nell,” he said.
After he left the house we saw him stoop, take off his shoes, and walk off with them in his hands. His feet left marks of blood in the snow. Shoes had been dealt out to the army only that morning, and his feet were so sore that his heavy, ill-fitting brogans were unendurable.
I have heard of many generous deeds like this done by Belle Boyd. Once, when riding out to review some troops near Winchester, she met a soldier, a mere boy, trudging along painfully on his bare feet. She took off her own shoes and made him put them on; they were fine cloth gaiters laced at the side, and trimmed with patent leather. Some one remonstrated; the shoes would not last the boy long enough to pay for her sacrifice.
“Oh,” she said, “if it rests his poor young feet only a little while, I am repaid. He is not old enough to be away from his mother.”
She did not spend another night with us. She seemed to feel that she had the weight of the Confederacy on her shoulders, and took the afternoon train for Richmond.
CHAPTER VI
A FAITHFUL SLAVE AND A HOSPITAL WARD
Not long after this I had to give up my room to Governor Bailey of Florida and his family. They had come on in search of their son, whom they had for months believed to be dead, and who, they had only recently learned, was alive and in the mountains near Culpeper Court-house.