“I came alone. I am carrying dispatches. To General Hooker.”
“Fighting Joe, eh? That’s a man after my own heart. Where is he?”
“Sakes alive!” she ejaculated. “That’s the best part of twenty miles from here. And all the district just abuzzing with Confeds. You must be brave!”
“No one in our war is brave,” he corrected. “Some are cowardly. Some are foolhardy. But the bulk of us on both sides of the quarrel just plod along and do our duty, as I’ve tried to do mine to-day. It isn’t bravery. It’s duty.”
“I’ve an idea,” she suggested, “that bravery and duty add up to pretty much the same thing; whether it’s in storming a fort or selling a yard of calico. Anyhow, mister--mister--”
“Dadd,” he answered glibly. “James Dadd.”
“Anyhow, Sergeant Dadd,” she continued, smiling ever so faintly at the odd name, “I know men pretty well. And I believe you’d do your duty, squarely and honestly, whether it was in war or in a shop.”
“Madam,” said Dad, miserably, “I didn’t do my duty in either. And, as for honesty, I have been even more remiss. Why, I have just told a lie that shames me to the soul. I have told it to the ministering angel who saved me from death or capture and who has since played Good Samaritan to me. The only woman in years who has shown me her sex’s divine pity.
“I have lied to you about my name. It is not James Dadd. It is James Brinton.”
He dared not look at her, but spoke rapidly, his eyes downcast, his fingers foolishly busy with the torn fringe of the chair in which he sat.
“I--I call myself James Dadd,” he blundered on. “And I suppose I have a right to. For it doesn’t harm anyone, and it gives me a chance to be in the army. They wouldn’t take me under my own name. But, oh, I love the old name, and it makes me ashamed every time I have to use the other one. Still, I’ve always figured--till now--that it’s nobody’s business. But--somehow I can’t lie to a woman that’s got eyes like yours.”
“Unless I’m very wrong,” she said, after a little breathless silence, “you aren’t given to telling lies to anyone at all, man or woman, Mr.--Brinton. As for going to the war under another name, I can’t see anything very terrible in that. I take it you didn’t enlist with the idea of cheating folks out of anything?”