"I would have killed her then," she said gravely.
"When she could not find that I was a spy, she fastened me in an open pen outside her shed. I tore off the clothes she had touched, they seemed so vile to me. I was so shamed that I held my hands to my throat so that I could die, but she came and fastened them with a cord. She kept me there all the evening, and the men looked over the pen and laughed at 'Mother Murray's prisoner.' After awhile I did not heed them. The moon came up, and I cried then thinking if mother or Joe could know what had come to me. Then I made up my mind what to do. I prayed to the Lord Jesus; but I thought, through all, what I would do. She brought me some food, but I would not touch it, though I was sick with hunger. When the drum had beat and the camp was all quiet, there was a sentry came walking up and down before the pen. He had a kind, good face: he whistled to keep himself awake. Afterwards he stopped it, and, leaning over the log-fence, said, 'Forgive me. I didn't think of your being a prisoner, or I would not have whistled.' It was so sudden, his kind way of speaking, that I began to cry, sitting back in the corner. He bade me never heed, for that I would be free in the morning. 'You're no spy,' he said,—'only Captain Roberts heard Mother Murray's story, and put me here till he could see for himself in the morning.' Then he asked me questions, and somehow it did me good to tell all about Joe, and how I had not found him. He stood there when I had done, thinking, and whistling again, soft to himself. 'Just you wait, Ellen,' he says,—'I know what you want.' And with that he takes out a little Testament, and, sitting down, he reads to me. Then he asked me what verses I liked, and talked of the chapters, till I began to forget all that had happened. Then he put the book in his pocket, and talked of other things, and made me laugh once or twice; and at last he took a card out of his pocket, and thought for a good while. Then he wrote a name on it, Mrs. Jane Burroughs, Xenia, Ohio, and gave it to me. 'That is my mother,' he said, very gravely,—'as good a woman as God lets live. Do you go to her, Ellen, when you're out of this den, and tell her I sent you, and, if I should die in this bloody business, to remember I said to be good to you.' Soon after that another man came and took his place, and I saw him no more. He was very kind. But I knew what I would do,"—with the same dropping of the voice.
In the morning Ellen was released, and the soldiers forbidden to molest her. She hurried along the road to Fairmont. There is a long bridge there, spanning the Monongahela. "I saw it when I was in the cars, and the sight of the water below it came back to me through all my trouble. It was noon when I came to it again. I don't think I stopped at all, to think about Joe, or to think good-bye to him. But," her eye wandering vaguely, "I said good-bye to my little basket I had packed it at home for my journey, you know. I thought Joe would laugh when he saw some things I had there. But it was all over now. So I went down to the water's edge, and set it down; and then I went up, and climbed up on the parapet of the bridge, and then I heard a cry, and I was jerked down to the ground. When I came to myself, I was in a bed. They had ice on my head. They told me they had found my basket, and so knew my name. I laid there for several days. It was soldiers that found me. They paid for me at the tavern. But the regiment was going on. One day, when I was able to sit up, two of them said to me, they would take me to see Joe. They took me on the cars; all the way I had to lie down, with ice to my head. We came a long way; every time we stopped, they said we were going to Joe. I didn't know, my brain was like fire in my head."
Ellen was sent on by the officers of this regiment, and lodged by them for safe-keeping in the jail at Wheeling. The long-suspended brain-fever had set in. She was taken through the streets, her clothes ragged and muddy, her head bare, followed by a curious crowd of idlers, with just enough reason left to know what the house was in which they lodged her. Cruel as they were in act, it proved a kindness to the girl. The jailer and his family nursed her carefully, and gave her a large, airy room in the old debtors' prison.
After she had been there three weeks, a person who had accidentally seen Ellen that first day on the street went to the jail and asked to see her. A whim, perhaps, the fruit of idleness or curiosity. But Ellen thought otherwise. She was clothed and in her right mind now, and sat inside of the iron door, looking with her large, grave, blue eyes searchingly at her visitor. "God sent you," she said, quietly.
That night she told the jailer's wife that her new friend had promised to come the next morning and take her out.
"She may disappoint you, Ellen."
"No. I know God meant her to come, and I shall see my brother again."
She was strangely cheerful; it seemed as if, in that long torpor, some vision of the future had in truth been given to her.
"I shall see Joe," she would repeat steadily, a great glow on her face, "I know."