The sergeant's ruddy, handsome face was the only cheerful object within the prison yard as he walked up and down, crossing the sentry's beat. The yard was small—it was at the back of the gloomy brick building—and only one narrow window looked out upon it. The day was dark and dull. The soldier marching up and down, clutching his musket, looked sulky and cold, and he wondered why a man like Sergeant Heywood, who didn't have to do sentry duty, should be pacing back and forth for two hours at a stretch.
The sight of a prisoner's face at the barred window did not add to the cheerfulness of the surroundings. The face was curiously twisted and distorted by a shot that had torn through the jaw. It would have been repulsive but for the eyes—eyes pathetic, curious, patient, almost the color of the faded "butternut" clothes of the prisoner. As soon as the sergeant saw the poor face at the window he halted in his walk, and called out, cheerily, "Hello, Kaintuck!"
"Hello!" responded Kaintuck, with equal
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 cheeriness, but in a thin, soft voice, such as might be expected to come out of his narrow chest.
"How are you to-day?" continued the sergeant.
"Purty well, considerin'," answered Kaintuck. "Las' night I didn't sleep very well. This here old jaw got to achin'; an', by golly, sergeant, she kin everlastin' ache when she starts in! Ef it hadn't ben for that terbacker you give me yesterday, I'll 'low I'd had a sorter onpleasant time. But it was a comfort, cert'n'y. Before I lit my pipe it seemed like I never was goin' ter see Polly an' the kid no more, that you blarsted Yankees was a-goin' ter whip us, spite o' General Lee, an' that this here jaw was a-goin' ter come all ter pieces. But I hadn't hardly lighted that pipe, sir, before I seen Polly an' the kid right before me, lookin' peart an' gay, an' Marse Bob had done licked you all like the devil, an' my jaw was all right, an' goin' ter stay so. That's what terbacker does for a man."
The sergeant accepted these indications of the prisoner's sympathies with great good-humor.
"I've got some more of that same brand," said he; "it affects me kinder the same way too. When I smoke, it seems to me General Grant is marchin' into Richmond, and the bands is playin' 'Yankee Doodle,' and I'm a colonel ridin' at the head of my regiment."
Kaintuck smiled at this. His smile was a mere contortion, but his deep strange eyes smiled luminously.
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"I reckon it's a kinder universal comforter. Did it bring your wife and your kids right up before you?"
The sergeant was a great strapping fellow, six feet high; but at this pleasantry he blushed like a girl.
"I ain't got a wife, nor kids either; but—"
"You've got a girl, hain't you? Come, sergeant, let's hear 'bout it. It's mighty lonesome somehow in this Government hotel."
The sergeant laughed, and came closer to the window. Just then a streak of sunlight fell upon him, as he stood with one foot advanced and his stalwart arms crossed; but the prison window and Kaintuck remained in the gloom. The sergeant pulled his cap down over his eyes quite bashfully, and cleared his throat.
"Now, I'm talking confidential, Kaintuck—"
"An' you don't want me to tell the agreeable an' amusin' companions I have in here," continued Kaintuck, in the same soft, slow voice. "Fac' is, when a man's been in prison fur eighteen months, an' never had a soul but them doctors ter take no more notice of him ner a dog, excep' yourself, sergeant—"
Kaintuck stopped. The retrospect struck him unpleasantly.
"Well, I'm goin' to tell you what I ain't told even to my folks at home. I've got a girl—an' she's only twenty-one years old, an' a widder—an' the biggest rebel, b'gosh—"
The sergeant brought all this out in jerks, in
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termingled with suppressed laughter; and when he announced the last fact, Kaintuck joined in his hilarity.
"Blamed if women ain't the queerest lot," remarked Kaintuck, chuckling.
"You bet," assented the sergeant, still laughing. "You oughter heard that gal sass me. There she was, all by herself in a little house, with a kid about two years old, an' when I come politely to tell her I'd take care the men didn't milk her cow or take her chickens, and told her she needn't be afraid of anything, she stood in her door, with that baby in her arms, and fairly poured hot shot into me. 'I'm a soldier's widow,' she says, her eyes blazing. 'Do you think I know what it is to be afraid of you? Oh, if this child only was a man to shoulder his dead father's musket!' Now, you know, Kaintuck, that kind o' talk from a poor young thing all dressed in black breaks a man all up. So I just kep' my cap in my hand, and I says, 'Madam, I respect a soldier's widow, no matter which side the soldier fought on, and whether you'll agree or not, I'll make it my business to see that you'll have some kind of protection.' We was in winter quarters then, about a mile from her house. You know, men is hard to manage sometimes, and if I hadn't spoke to some of the officers, the poor thing's little all in the way of chickens and such would have gone. But I told my cap'n about it, and that her husband was killed in the rebel army, and he settled it so that not a man dared to be seen near that hen roost
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 and cow pasture. But I don't know what she'd 'a done for wood if I hadn't looked out for her. I'd drop an armful, and knock at the door, and she'd open it. Then I'd say, 'Will you please to tell me where to put this?' 'Anywhere you like,' she'd say, and go on with her knittin' an' sewin'. It kinder nettled me at first, but she looked so young and pitiful, I couldn't get mad with her. Then somehow that young one got almighty fond of me. Every time I'd pass by that little house—and I got to goin' by purty often—he'd come toddlin' out—he was a handsome youngster—and he'd howl like tarnation if I didn't take him up in my arms. At first his mother—her name's Mary—would look black at me; but one day the little feller took my cap out of my hand, and tried to put it on his own head. 'No, sir,' says I. 'The lady yonder'll think you're poisoned if you put a blue cap on your head.' At that she laughed. I never seen her laugh before."
Kaintuck had pressed his face close to the bars of the window to hear the sergeant's story by this time, and the sergeant had advanced a step or two so that they could talk in a low voice.
"Go on," said Kaintuck. "How did you git the better of her at last?"
"I don't know," answered the sergeant, pulling his cap down a little farther yet, and showing his white teeth in a smile. "First time I told her she was pretty—by George!"
The sergeant stopped short, completely overcome by the recollection.
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"Kaintuck, she don't more'n come up to my shoulder, an' she weighs about a hundred pounds, but I thought she was going to whip me then and there. I've been scared nearly to death two or three times during this unpleasantness, but I swear, Kaintuck, if that little widder wasn't the first rebel that started me on the dead run, without makin' some sort of a show of fightin'. However, I felt so mean about showing the white feather that I just determined I wasn't going to be stampeded that way again. So I braced up, an' put on my best uniform, an' went to see her again. She says, 'I'm a rebel, and I'm bound to be one always.' 'That's all right,' says I, 'bein' you're nothin' but a woman, and a mighty little one at that, and ma'am,' says I, 'this thing's goin' to be decided without the slightest reference to which side you are on.' She laughed, and then, without any sort o' warning, she turned her pretty face to the wall and begun to cry. After a while I talked to her sensible like. I says, 'Here you are alone and unprotected. How are you going to bring up that boy? What'll you do when I go away?' She turned white, and held the child in her arms. I said, 'I'll not only do for you, but I'll do for the boy besides. I've got a little money saved up, and he'll have his share of it. He shan't never know what it is not to have a father if you'll marry me, Mary.' So after a while, between crying and kissing the baby, and looking mournfully at the fire, she agreed to marry me if I'd wait till the spring, and in May I'm going to get leave—my cap'n
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 knows all about it—and there'll be one rebel less, I believe, before long, though she does swear she'll never be anything but a rebel."
"Sergeant," said Kaintuck, "how did she take the partin'? Since you've been so free, you won't mind my askin' the question."
The sergeant hesitated, but there was something so strangely sympathetic in poor Kaintuck's humid eyes, and in the ghost of a smile that haunted his patient face, that the sergeant could not but tell. "She behaved like a little soldier till the last. I didn't half like her being so brave. But when she knew she was seein' me for the last time—well—er—I couldn't exactly tell another feller. Anyhow, she had been makin' out all along she was thinkin' about the boy, but I swear I believe she forgot all about the blessed kid. She never told me in so many words, but I kinder suspect she didn't care so much about the dead feller as she thought. It leaked out in little things, that he was kind to her, and she wasn't out of her teens, and I don't believe she was really grown up until she heard he was dead in prison, and she had to look out for herself. Howsomever," said the sergeant, pulling himself together, and laughing again—he was a good-natured fellow—"I've told you a durned sight of spooney stuff."
"An' I won't mention it to the rats, neither," answered Kaintuck.
"It's time for me to be goin'," remarked the sergeant, with a sudden accession of shamefacedness following his confidences.
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"And I'm thinkin'," called out Kaintuck after him as he strode away, "that little rebel widder is goin' to git a mighty good feller for a husband!"
For four or five days the sergeant was too busy to go near the prison, but one evening at nightfall, as he was trudging along to his quarters, some one hailed him. It was the chaplain, a small, meek man, as brave as a lion. He and the sergeant had seen service together.
"Is that Sergeant Heywood?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," answered the sergeant, touching his cap.
"There's a poor fellow down at the jail"—everybody called Kaintuck a poor fellow—"who has been asking for you. He's going to die, I think."
The sergeant started. Who ever bestowed kindness and care on a prisoner that did not come to love him finally? "Why, sir?" asked the sergeant, after a pause. "What's the matter with him, sir?"
"Nothing—but death. He is rather an extraordinary fellow. His determination to live brought him through enough to kill ten men. A day or two ago he got a letter, and since then he seems equally determined to die. These cases are not so uncommon, after all. Did you never hear how easily a great strapping Russian soldier dies of homesickness or disappointment—any little thing that takes away the desire of living?"
"May be it's the Russian doctors, sir," replied the sergeant quite gravely. Fear of shot and shell
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 he knew not, but he had been seen to turn pale at the sight of the surgeon's scalpel, and to have crawled out to parade with a shaking ague on him rather than encounter a visit from that same surgeon.
The chaplain smiled. "It's not the doctors this time, though Heaven knows I fear some of these army surgeons myself."
"I didn't think you was afraid of anything, sir, after that day at Cedar Mountain, when the officers kep' ordering you to the rear, and you wouldn't budge a peg."
A faint color crept into the chaplain's sallow face. This humble and unstudied tribute pleased him.
The sergeant was a strict disciplinarian, and knew better than to stand too long talking with his officer, so he touched his cap and moved on.
When he reached the prison, it was already dark. He walked through the long corridor until he reached Kaintuck's cell, in which a lamp—a rare luxury—was burning. To the sergeant's surprise, Kaintuck was up and dressed and sitting on the narrow bed. On his knees was a large new Bible which the chaplain had given him, but which he was not reading. His strange eyes were fixed on the door, and when the sergeant's big figure filled up the doorway, something like joy flashed into his maimed face. He got up and shuffled over to meet the sergeant.
"Why, sergeant," he cried, "I thought you had forgot me!"
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"No, I ain't forgot you," answered the sergeant kindly; "but the chaplain told me you was goin' to give us the............