hen that it
mattered little to him what her mother wished, and that an objection by
her or by anybody would be futile. She saw the soldiers conduct the
prisoner in gray into the barn, and for a long time she watched the
three chatting guards and the pondering sentry. Upon her mind in
desolate weight was the recollection of the three men in the feed box.

It seemed to her that in a case of this description it was her duty to
be a heroine. In all the stories she had read when at boarding school in
Pennsylvania, the girl characters, confronted with such difficulties,
invariably did hair breadth things. True, they were usually bent upon
rescuing and recovering their lovers, and neither the calm man in gray
nor any of the three in the feed box was lover of hers, but then a real
heroine would not pause over this minor question. Plainly a heroine
would take measures to rescue the four men. If she did not at least make
the attempt, she would be false to those carefully constructed ideals
which were the accumulation of years of dreaming.

But the situation puzzled her. There was the barn with only one door,
and with four armed troopers in front of this door, one of them with his
back to the rest of the world, engaged, no doubt, in a steadfast
contemplation of the calm man and, incidentally, of the feed box. She
knew, too, that even if she should open the kitchen door, three heads
and perhaps four would turn casually in her direction. Their ears were
real ears.

Heroines, she knew, conducted these matters with infinite precision and
despatch. They severed the hero's bonds, cried a dramatic sentence, and
stood between him and his enemies until he had run far enough away. She
saw well, however, that even should she achieve all things up to the
point where she might take glorious stand between the escaping and the
pursuers, those grim troopers in blue would not pause. They would run
around her, make a circuit. One by one she saw the gorgeous contrivances
and expedients of fiction fall before the plain, homely difficulties of
this situation. They were of no service. Sadly, ruefully, she thought of
the calm man and of the contents of the feed box.

The sum of her invention was that she could sally forth to the commander
of the blue cavalry, and confessing to him that there were three of her
friends and his enemies secreted in the feed box, pray him to let them
depart unmolested. But she was beginning to believe the old graybeard to