The sergeant laughed, and came closer to the window. Just then a streak of sunlight fell upon him, as he stood with one foot advanced and his stalwart arms crossed; but the prison window and Kaintuck remained in the gloom. The sergeant pulled his cap down over his eyes quite bashfully, and cleared his throat. "Now, I'm talking confidential, Kaintuck--" "An' you don't want me to tell the agreeable an' amusin' companions I have in here," continued Kaintuck, in the same soft, slow voice. "Fac' is, when a man's been in prison fur eighteen months, an' never had a soul but them doctors ter take no more notice of him ner a dog, excep' yourself, sergeant--" Kaintuck stopped. The retrospect struck him unpleasantly. "Well, I'm goin' to tell you what I ain't told even to my folks at home. I've got a girl--an' she's only twenty-one years old, an' a widder--an' the biggest rebel, b'gosh--" The sergeant brought all this out in jerks, intermingled with suppressed laughter; and when he announced the last fact, Kaintuck joined in his hilarity. "Blamed if women ain't the queerest lot," remarked Kaintuck, chuckling. "You bet," assented the sergeant, still laughing. "You oughter heard that gal sass me. There she was, all by herself in a little house, with a kid about two years old, an' when I come politely to tell her I'd take care the men didn't milk her cow or take her chickens, and told her she needn't be afraid of anything, she stood in her door, with that baby in her arms, and fairly poured hot shot into me. 'I'm a soldier's widow,' she says, her eyes blazing. 'Do you think I know what it is to be afraid of _you_? Oh, if this child only was a man to shoulder his dead father's musket!' Now, you know, Kaintuck, that kind o' talk from a poor young thing all dressed in black breaks a man all up. So I just kep' my cap in my hand, and I says, 'Madam, I respect a soldier's widow, no matter which side the soldier fought on, and whether you'll agree or not, I'll make it my business to see that you'll have some kind of protection.' We was in winter quarters then, about a mile from her house. You know, men is hard to manage sometimes, and if I hadn't spoke to some of the officers, the poor thing's little all in the way of chickens and such would have gone. But I told my cap'n about it, and that her husband was killed in the rebel army, and he settled it so that not a man dared to be seen near that hen roost and cow pasture. But I don't know what she'd 'a done for wood if I hadn't looked out for her. I'd drop an armful, and knock at the door, and she'd open it. Then I'd say, 'Will you please to tell me where to put this?' 'Anywhere you like,' she'd say, and go on with her knittin' an' sewin'. It kinder nettled me at first, but she looked so young and pitiful, I couldn't get mad with her. Then somehow that young one got almighty fond of me. Every time I'd pass by that little house--and I got to goin' by purty