While her mother was busied in getting her father comfortable, she thought, as it was such bright moonlight, she would go out to give her turkeys a count, it having been two or three nights since she had counted them.
Slipping a shawl of her mother's over her head, she opened softly the kitchen door to steal out. The lowest possible whistle from Jack accosted her at the house corner. That lad intercepted her course, drew her back into the shadow, and bade her "Look!"
She looked across the snow, over the garden wall, into the orchard, and there, beneath her apple-tree, stood something between a man and a scarecrow, and it appeared to be looking up at the sleeping turkeys. Both arms were uplifted.
"O dear! what shall we do?" whispered Becca, all in a shiver of cold and excitement.
"Let's go and speak to him. Maybe it is our hospital man," said Jack, with a great appearance of courage.
The two children started, hand in hand, and approached the soldier so quietly that he did not hear the sound of their coming.
As they went, Becca squeezed her brother's fingers and pointing to the snow over which they walked, whispered the word "Blood!"
"From his feet," responded Jack, shutting his teeth tightly together.
Yes, there it lay in bright drops on the glistening snow, showing where the feet of the patriot had trod. The children stood still when they were come near to the tree. At the instant their mother appeared in the kitchen doorway and called "Jack!"
The ragged soldier of the United American States lost his courage at the instant and began to retire in confusion; but Becca summoned him to "Wait a minute!" He waited.
"Did you want one of my turkeys?" she asked.
"I was going to _steal_ one, to save my brother's life," he answered.
"Is he only a boy, and has he light hair and blue eyes, and does he lie on the wet ground?"
"Then take a good, big, fat turkey--that one there, if you can get him," said Becca. "They are all mine."
"How many men are there in your hospital?" asked Jack, who had responded to his mother's summons, and was holding a pair of warm stockings in his hand.
"Give him another, Bec--there's a good girl; three turkeys ain't a bone too many for twelve hungry men," prompted Jack.