He shot a perplexed and slightly suspicious glance at her, then the frowning importance faded from his beardless face; he bit a piece out of the soggy corncake he was holding and glanced up at her again, amiably conscious of her attractions; besides, her voice and manner had been a revelation. Evidently her father had had her educated at some valley school remote from these raw solitudes. So he smiled at her, quite willing to be argued with and entertained; and at his suggestion she shyly seated herself on the sill outside in the sunlight. "Have you lived here long?" he asked encouragingly. "Not very," she said, eyes downcast, her clasped hands lying loosely over one knee. The soft, creamy-tinted fingers occupied his attention for a moment; the hand resembled the hand of "quality"; so did the ankle and delicate arch of her naked foot, half imprisoned in the coarse shoe under her skirt's edge. He had often heard that some of these mountaineers had pretty children; here, evidently, was a most fascinating example. "Is your mother living?" he asked pleasantly. "No, sir." He thought to himself that she must resemble her dead mother, because the man whom the cavalry had caught in the creek was a coarse-boned, red-headed ruffian, quite impossible to reconcile as the father of this dark-haired, dark-eyed, young forest creature, with her purely-molded limbs and figure and sensitive fashion of speaking. He turned to her curiously: "So you have not always lived here on the mountain." "No, not always." "I suppose you spent a whole year away from home at boarding-school," he suggested with patronizing politeness. "Yes, six years at Edgewood," she said in a low voice. "What?" he exclaimed, repeating the name of the most fashionable Southern institute for young ladies. "Why, I had a sister there--Margaret Kent. Were _you_ there? And did you ever--er--see my sister?" "I knew her," said the Special Messenger absently. He was very silent for a while, thinking to himself. "It must have been her mother; that measly old man we caught in the creek is 'poor white' all through." And, munching thoughtfully again on his soggy corncake, he pondered over the strange fate of this fascinating young girl, fashioned to slay the hearts of Southern chivalry--so young, so sweet, so soft of voice and manner, condemned to live life through alone in this shaggy solitude--fated, doubtless, to mate with some loose, lank, shambling, hawk-eyed rustic of the peaks--doomed to bear sickly children, and to fade and dry and wither in the full springtide of her youth and loveliness. "It's too bad," he said fretfully, unconscious that he spoke aloud, unaware, too, that she had risen and was moving idly, with bent head, among the weeds of the truck garden--edging nearer, nearer, to a dark, round object about the size of a small apple, which had rolled into a furrow where the ground was all cut up by the wheel tracks of artillery and hoofs of heavy horses.