ave during that time carried your image
with me constantly. Even this meeting, which was only the result of an
accident, I had been seeking for three years. I find you here under your
own peaceful vine and fig-tree, and yet three years ago you came to me
out of the thunder-cloud of battle."

"My good gracious!" said Miss Sally.

She had been clasping her knee with her linked fingers, but separated
them and leaned backward on the sofa with affected consternation, but
an expression of growing amusement in her bright eyes. Courtland saw the
mistake of his tone, but it was too late to change it now. He handed
her the locket and the letter, and briefly, and perhaps a little more
seriously, recounted the incident that had put him in possession of
them. But he entirely suppressed the more dramatic and ghastly details,
and his own superstition and strange prepossession towards her.

Miss Sally took the articles without a tremor, or the least deepening
or paling of the delicate, faint suffusion of her cheek. When she had
glanced over the letter, which appeared to be brief, she said, with
smiling, half-pitying tranquillity:--

"Yes!--it WAS that poor Chet Brooks, sure! I heard that he was killed
at Snake River. It was just like him to rush in and get killed the first
pop! And all for nothing, too,--pure foolishness!"

Shocked, yet relieved, but uneasy under both sensations, Courtland went
on blindly:

"But he was not the only one, Miss Dows. There was another man picked up
who also had your picture."

"Yes--Joyce Masterton. They sent it to me. But you didn't kill HIM,
too?"

"I don't know that I personally killed either," he said a little coldly.
He paused, and continued with a gravity which he could not help feeling
very inconsistent and even ludicrous: "They were brave men, Miss Dows."

"To have worn my picture?" said Miss Sally brightly.

"To have THOUGHT they had so much to live for, and yet to have willingly
laid down their lives for what they believed was right."

"Yo' didn't go huntin' me for three years to tell ME, a So'th'n girl,
that So'th'n men know how to fight, did yo', co'nnle?" returned the
young lady, with the slightest lifting of her head and drooping of her
blue-veined lids in a divine hauteur. "They were always ready enough for
that, even among themselves. It was much easier for these pooah boys to
fight a thing out than think it out, or work it out. Yo' folks in the
No'th learned to do all three;