The old man caught the arm of the soldier. “Go right in, my boy. She’s that glad to see you unhurt she don’t know what to do. She ’ll give you a mouthful gladder ’n she ever fed a Yank.”
Mounting the log steps to the cabin door seemed to deprive the soldier of the last vestige of his strength. As if from a distance he heard the girl’s complaining voice, and a blur hung before his sight. Blindly he felt for a chair and sank into it. His head was sinking to his breast, when the sharp voice of the girl—sharper because of her grandfather’s meddling—revived him like the lash of a whip on the back of a succumbing beast of burden.
“Pa’s dead, John Ericson,” she cried. “Shot down, fer all I know, by you. He’s gone. Now I reckon you see why I don’t like the looks o’ yore clothes. Then jest see heer.” She flounced into a corner of the room, jerked a trunk open and brought to him the soiled uniform of a Federal soldier. “This was what Brother Jasper had on when he died. That hole in the breast is where the ball went in. He come home a week ago on a furlough to git over his wound, an’ died a-settin’ thar in that door. Do you wonder that I never want to lay eyes on a dirty gray coat again?”
Ericson’s slouched hat hid the piteous glare in his eyes. He rested his two hands on the arms of the chair and tried to draw himself up, but that effort was the signal for his collapse. The girl laid the uniform on the table and stared at him, the lines of her face softening and betraying vague disquietude.
“Look a heer,” she blurted out, suddenly, “are—are you wounded?”
He tried to speak, but his lips seemed paralyzed.
“My God! Grandpa, look!” the girl cried. “He’s wounded! He’s dying, an’ I’ve jest been a-standin’ heer—”
The old man bent over the soldier, and turned his face upward.
“Say, whar are you hit, Johnny?”
Ericson tried to affect a careless smile, and managed to place his hand on his wounded side. The old man unbuttoned his coat.