“I understood from General Sheridan that the Special Messenger was to report to me. Where is she?”
The lightning pain of the shock when she recognized the uniform interfered with breath and speech; confused, she raised her gloved hand and laid it unconsciously over her heart; and the colonel of the Fourth Missouri waited.
“I am the Special Messenger,” she said faintly.
For a moment he scarcely understood that this slender young fellow, with dark hair as closely clipped and as curly as his own, could be a woman. Stern surprise hardened his narrowing gaze; he stood silent, handsome head high, looking down at her; then slowly the latent humor flickered along the edges of lip and lid, curbed instantly as he bowed, faultless, handsome—only the persistently upturned mustache impairing the perfectly detached and impersonal decorum with a warning of the beau sabreur behind it all.
“Will you be seated, madam?”
“Thank you.”
She sat down; the wet poncho was hot and she shifted it, throwing one end across her shoulder. In her uniform she appeared willowy and slim, built like a boy, and with nothing of that graceful awkwardness which almost inevitably betrays such masqueraders. For her limbs were straight at the knees and faultlessly coupled, and there seemed to be the adolescent’s smooth lack of development in the scarcely accented hips—only a straightly flowing harmony of proportion—a lad’s grace muscularly undeveloped.
Two leather straps crossed her breast, one weighted with field glasses, the other with a pouch. From the latter she drew her credentials and would have risen to present them, but the colonel of the Fourth Missouri detained her with a gesture, himself rose, and took the papers from her hand.
While he sat reading, she, hands clasped in her lap, gazed at his well-remembered uniform, busy with her memories once more, and the sweetness of them—and the pain.
They were three years old, these memories, now glimmering alive again amid the whitening ashes of the past; only three years—and centuries seemed to dim the landmarks and bar the backward path that she was following to her girlhood!