my. The Colonel used to get awfully
jealous o' him, because everybody that'd come into camp 'd mistake him
for the Colonel. He'd 'a' bin Colonel, too, if he'd only lived. But the
poor fellow broke his heart. He fell in love with a girl somewhere up
North--Pewter Hatchet, or some place like that. I never saw her, and
don't know nothin' about her, but I heard that the boys from her
place said that she was no match for him. She was only plain,
ordinary-lookin'."

"That wasn't true," said the woman, under her breath.

"All the same, Elliott was dead-stuck on her. Bimeby he heard some
way that some stay-at-home widower was settin' up to her, and she was
encouragin' him, and finally married him. When Elliott heard that he
was completely beside himself. He lost all appetite for everything but
whisky and the blood of widowers. Whenever he found a man who was a
widower he wanted to kill him. At Chickamauga, he'd pick out the men
that looked old enough to be widowers, and shoot at them, and no others.
In the last charge he got separated, and was by himself with a tall
rebel with a gray beard. 'I surrender,' said the rebel. 'Are you a
widower?' asked Elliott. 'I'm sorry to say that my wife's dead,' said
the rebel. 'Then you can't surrender. I'm goin' to kill you,' said
Elliott. But he'd bin throwed off his guard by too much talkin'. The
rebel got the drop on him, and killed him."

"It ain't true that his girl went back on him before she heard he was
killed," said the woman angrily, forgetting herself. "She only married
after the report of his death in the papers."

"Jerusha," said Shorty, pulling out the letters and picture, rising to
his feet, and assuming as well as he could in the rocking car the pose
and manner of the indignant lovers he had seen in melodramas, "I'm
Dan Elliott, and your own true love, whose heart you've broke. When I
learned of your faithlessness I sought death, but death went back on me.
I've come back from the grave to reproach you. You preferred the love of
a second-hand husband, with a silver watch-chain and a raft o' logs, to
that of an honest soldier who had no fortune but his patriotic heart
and his Springfield rifle. But I'll not be cruel to you. There are the
evidences of your faithlessness, that you was so anxious to git hold of.
Your secret's safe in this true heart. Take 'em and be happy with your
bridge-timber contractor. Be a lovin' wife to your warmed-over husband.
Be proud of his speculati