signal at the southern end of a deep, rocky valley, and, in
a patch of gray, snow-flecked woods, took on board Mary Richling,
dressed in deep mourning, and her little Alice. The three or four
passengers already in the coach saw no sign of human life through the
closed panes save the roof of one small cabin that sent up its slender
thread of blue smoke at one corner of a little badly cleared field a
quarter of a mile away on a huge hill-side. As the scant train crawled
off again into a deep, ice-hung defile, it passed the silent figure of a
man in butternut homespun, spattered with dry mud, standing close beside
the track on a heap of cross-tie cinders and fire-bent railroad iron, a
gray goat-beard under his chin, and a quilted homespun hat on his head.
From beneath the limp brim of this covering, as the train moved by him,
a tender, silly smile beamed upward toward one hastily raised window,
whence the smile of Mary and the grave, unemotional gaze of the child
met it for a moment before the train swung round a curve in the narrow
way, and quickened speed on down grade.

The conductor came and collected her fare. He smelt of tobacco above the
smell of the coach in general.

"Do you charge anything for the little girl?"

The purse in which the inquirer's finger and thumb tarried was limber
and flat.

"No, ma'am."

It was not the customary official negative; a tawdry benevolence of face
went with it, as if to say he did not charge because he would not; and
when Mary returned a faint beam of appreciation he went out upon the
rear platform and wiped the plenteous dust from his shoulders and cap.
Then he returned to his seat at the stove and renewed his conversation
with a lieutenant in hard-used blue, who said "the rebel lines ought
never to have been allowed to fall back to Nashville," and who knew "how
Grant could have taken Fort Donelson a week ago if he had had any
sense."

There were but few persons, as we have said, in the car. A rough man in
one corner had a little captive, a tiny, dappled fawn, tied by a short,
rough bit of rope to the foot of the car-seat. When the conductor by and
by lifted the little Alice up from the cushion, where she sat with her
bootees straight in front of her at its edge, and carried her,
speechless and drawn together like a kitten, and stood her beside the
captive orphan, she simply turned about and pattered back to her
mother's side.

"I don't believe she even saw it," said the co