The sergeant hesitated, but there was something so strangely sympathetic in poor Kaintuck's humid eyes, and in the ghost of a smile that haunted his patient face, that the sergeant could not but tell. "She behaved like a little soldier till the last. I didn't half like her being so brave. But when she knew she was seein' me for the last time--well--er--I couldn't exactly tell another feller. Anyhow, she had been makin' out all along she was thinkin' about the boy, but I swear I believe she forgot all about the blessed kid. She never told me in so many words, but I kinder suspect she didn't care so much about the dead feller as she thought. It leaked out in little things, that he was kind to her, and she wasn't out of her teens, and I don't believe she was really grown up until she heard he was dead in prison, and she had to look out for herself. Howsomever," said the sergeant, pulling himself together, and laughing again--he was a good-natured fellow--"I've told you a durned sight of spooney stuff." "An' I won't mention it to the rats, neither," answered Kaintuck. "It's time for me to be goin'," remarked the sergeant, with a sudden accession of shamefacedness following his confidences. "And I'm thinkin'," called out Kaintuck after him as he strode away, "that little rebel widder is goin' to git a mighty good feller for a husband!" For four or five days the sergeant was too busy to go near the prison, but one evening at nightfall, as he was trudging along to his quarters, some one hailed him. It was the chaplain, a small, meek man, as brave as a lion. He and the sergeant had seen service together. "Is that Sergeant Heywood?" he asked. "Yes, sir," answered the sergeant, touching his cap. "There's a poor fellow down at the jail"--everybody called Kaintuck a poor fellow--"who has been asking for you. He's going to die, I think." The sergeant started. Who ever bestowed kindness and care on a prisoner that did not come to love him finally? "Why, sir?" asked the sergeant, after a pause. "What's the matter with him, sir?" "Nothing--but death. He is rather an extraordinary fellow. His determination to live brought him through enough to kill ten men. A day or two ago he got a letter, and since then he seems equally determined to die. These cases are not so uncommon, after all. Did you never hear how easily a great strapping Russian soldier dies of homesickness or disappointment--any little thing that takes away the desire of living?" "May be it's the Russian doctors, sir," replied the sergeant quite gravely. Fear of shot and shell he knew not, but he had been seen to turn pale at the sight of the surgeon's scalpel, and to have crawled out to parade with a shaking ague on him rather than encounter a visit from that same surgeon. The chaplain smiled. "It's not the doctors this time, though Heaven knows I fear some of these army surgeons myself."