"We'll soon test that," growled the camp-follower.
"Here, you Jake, unhand the girl! Yonder's Captain C---- looking this way. If she turns out as I say, it'll be a lucky stroke of work for you an' me."
Jake flung her back with a curse, and the woman led her to her shed. She searched Ellen. I saw the girl, when she told it, turn ashy white with terrible shame and anger. She was one of the womanliest women I ever knew.
"I would have killed her then," she said gravely.
"When she could not find that I was a spy, she fastened me in an open pen outside her shed. I tore off the clothes she had touched, they seemed so vile to me. I was so shamed that I held my hands to my throat so that I could die, but she came and fastened them with a cord. She kept me there all the evening, and the men looked over the pen and laughed at 'Mother Murray's prisoner.' After awhile I did not heed them. The moon came up, and I cried then thinking if mother or Joe could know what had come to me. _Then I made up my mind what to do._ I prayed to the Lord Jesus; but I thought, through all, what I would do. She brought me some food, but I would not touch it, though I was sick with hunger. When the drum had beat and the camp was all quiet, there was a sentry came walking up and down before the pen. He had a kind, good face: he whistled to keep himself awake. Afterwards he stopped it, and, leaning over the log-fence, said, 'Forgive me. I didn't think of your being a prisoner, or I would not have whistled.' It was so sudden, his kind way of speaking, that I began to cry, sitting back in the corner. He bade me never heed, for that I would be free in the morning. 'You're no spy,' he said,--'only Captain Roberts heard Mother Murray's story, and put me here till he could see for himself in the morning.' Then he asked me questions, and somehow it did me good to tell all about Joe, and how I had not found him. He stood there when I had done, thinking, and whistling again, soft to himself. 'Just you wait, Ellen,' he says,--'I know what you want.' And with that he takes out a little Testament, and, sitting down, he reads to me. Then he asked me what verses I liked, and talked of the chapters, till I began to forget all that had happened. Then he put the book in his pocket, and talked of other things, and made me laugh once or twice; and at last he took a card out of his pocket, and thought for a good while. Then he wrote a name on it, Mrs. Jane Burroughs, Xenia, Ohio, and gave it to me. 'That is my mother,' he said, very gravely,--'as good a woman as God lets live. Do you go to her, Ellen, when you're out of this den, and tell her I sent you, and, if I should die in this bloody business, to remember I said to be good to you.' Soon after that another man came and took his place, and I saw him no more. He was very kind. But I knew what _I_ would do,"--with the same dropping of the voice.