He hummed the forlorn chanson of Joe
Bowers of the State of Pike, which Bledsoe, then lying cold and stiff
under a mountain howitzer, had so often bellowed forth.

"It said that Sal was false to me,
Her love for me had fled,
She's got married to a butcher--
The butcher's hair was red."

But he sung it as a plaint, yet not hopelessly, and Mademoiselle Berthe
was the maid entreated of his melody.

The sharpshooters on both sides paused as the coach drove into the
little sweet-scented wood that was called the Alameda, and the
Missourians, with sabres at salute, transferred their charge to the
Imperialists crowding around. Among the latter were some of Jacqueline's
own countrymen, and those, in starvation and defeat, were as debonair as
the cadets of Gascogne.

"A rose, mademoiselle," said one, bowing low. He had an arm bandaged,
and his sword was broken. "An early merciful bullet plucked it for you,
so that it fell unhurt, though the petals of all the others are
scattered everywhere among the leaves, among the fallen branches, among
the shattered statues of our classic grove here. See, like the rose I
tender, you come among us poor broken soldiers of fortune. I think, dear
lady, there will be those above to bless you for it."

Jacqueline smiled behind her tears. "Always a Frenchman, eh, mon
lieutenant?" she said.

The fragrance of the place was smothered under gunpowder and sluggish
fumes. The pleasant drives, the grass, the flowers, were trampled by
gaunt soldiers bearing their wounded, but the young officer murmured on
in the speech of the Alameda's one time fashionable promenade.

"Who is that?" she interrupted.

She pointed over the heads around her to a man bearing someone off the
late bloody field, and that moment staggering across the trenches into
the Alameda. It was an act that moved her, for the rescuer was a richly
uniformed officer, and the other but a common soldier. With Berthe close
behind, she alighted from the coach and hurried forward to help. The
wounded soldier's face lay on the officer's breast, and she saw only his
hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly
fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the
callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege had come at
last.

"Lay him in my carriage--but carefully, you!" she said, and was obeyed,
while Berthe deftly fixed cloaks and blankets around the withered form.
Someone