til I return. Wait a second; I'm going to keep my
saddlebags with me."

And a few minutes later, as the troopers rode away in the mist with
their prisoner, her gentle voice followed them:

"Don't be rough with him, Connor. Say to the colonel that there is no
harm in him at all, but keep him in sight until I return; and _don't_
let him go fishing!"

* * * * *

She began housekeeping at sunrise by taking a daring bath in the stream,
then, dressing, she made careful inventory of the contents of the house
and a cautious survey of the immediate environment.

The premises, so unexpectedly and unwillingly abandoned by its late
obese tenant, harbored, besides herself, only one living creature--a fat
kitten.

The ferry house stood above the dangerous south bank of the river in a
grove of oaks, surrounded for miles by open country.

A flight of rickety, wooden stairs pitched downward from the edge of the
grassy bank to a wharf at the water's edge--the mere skeleton of a wharf
now, outlined only by decaying stringpieces. But here the patched-up
punt was moored; and above it, nailed to a dead tree, the sign with its
huge lettering still remained:

RED FERRY
HOLLER TWICE

sufficiently distinct to be deciphered from the opposite shore. Sooner
or later the fugitive would have to come to the river. Probably the
cavalry would catch him at one of the fords, or some rifleman might
shoot him swimming. But, if he did not know the fords, and could not
swim, there was only one ferry for him; east, west, and north he had
long since been walled in. The chances were that some night a
cock-o'-the-pines would squeal from the woods across the river, and then
she knew what to do.

During those broiling days of waiting she had leisure enough. Seated
outside her shanty, in the shade of the trees, where she was able to
keep watch both ways--south for her own safety's sake, north for the
doomed man--she occupied herself with mending stockings and underwear,
raising her eyes at intervals to sweep the landscape.

Nobody came into that heated desolation; neither voice nor gunshot
echoed far or near. Day after day the foliage of the trees spread
motionless under cloudless skies; day after day the oily river slipped
between red mud banks in heated silence. In sky, on earth, nothing
stirred except, at intervals, some buzzard turning, high in the blinding
b