In the morning Ellen was released, and the soldiers forbidden to molest her. She hurried along the road to Fairmont. There is a long bridge there, spanning the Monongahela. "I saw it when I was in the cars, and the sight of the water below it came back to me through all my trouble. It was noon when I came to it again. I don't think I stopped at all, to think about Joe, or to think good-bye to him. But," her eye wandering vaguely, "I said good-bye to my little basket I had packed it at home for my journey, you know. I thought Joe would laugh when he saw some things I had there. But it was all over now. So I went down to the water's edge, and set it down; and then I went up, and climbed up on the parapet of the bridge, and then I heard a cry, and I was jerked down to the ground. When I came to myself, I was in a bed. They had ice on my head. They told me they had found my basket, and so knew my name. I laid there for several days. It was soldiers that found me. They paid for me at the tavern. But the regiment was going on. One day, when I was able to sit up, two of them said to me, they would take me to see Joe. They took me on the cars; all the way I had to lie down, with ice to my head. We came a long way; every time we stopped, they said we were going to Joe. I didn't know, my brain was like fire in my head."
Ellen was sent on by the officers of this regiment, and lodged by them for safe-keeping in the jail at Wheeling. The long-suspended brain-fever had set in. She was taken through the streets, her clothes ragged and muddy, her head bare, followed by a curious crowd of idlers, with just enough reason left to know what the house was in which they lodged her. Cruel as they were in act, it proved a kindness to the girl. The jailer and his family nursed her carefully, and gave her a large, airy room in the old debtors' prison.
After she had been there three weeks, a person who had accidentally seen Ellen that first day on the street went to the jail and asked to see her. A whim, perhaps, the fruit of idleness or curiosity. But Ellen thought otherwise. She was clothed and in her right mind now, and sat inside of the iron door, looking with her large, grave, blue eyes searchingly at her visitor. "God sent you," she said, quietly.
