The man went out. In a few minutes he came back again, and with him the woman that had stayed out on the deck of the Pacific steamer when the boat came past the light of Corregidor.
The Colonel gave his visitor a seat. “What can I do for you?” he said.
“Can I speak to you alone?”
“Can’t that man out there hear?” motioning toward a soldier pacing back and forth before the door.
“No,” said the officer. “We are quite alone.”
The woman unfolded a sheet of paper which she had been holding, and looked at it a moment. Then she looked at the officer. “I want to see Heber Smith, of Company F, of your regiment,” she said. “Can you tell me where he is?”
In spite of himself—in spite of the self possession which he would have said his campaigning experience had given him, the Colonel started.
“Are you his—?” he began to say. But he changed the question to, “Was he a relative of yours?”
“I am his mother,” the woman said, as if she had completed the officer’s first question in her mind and answered it.