one, but
bolts and bars can't keep out death; Arvilly's arms, though she wuz
strong boneded, couldn't. Diphtheria wuz round, little Annie took it;
in one week Arvilly wuz indeed alone, and when the sod lay between her
and what little likeness of her husband had shone through the child's
pretty face, Arvilly formed a strange resolution, but not so strange
but what wimmen have formed it before, and probably will agin till
God's truth shall shine on a dark world and be listened to, and wars
shall be no more. She made up her mind to foller the man she loved, to
enlist. She wuz always a masculine lookin' creeter, big, raw boneded,
and when she cut off her hair and parted it on one side in a man's way
and put on a suit of her husband's clothes she looked as much, or more
like a man than she had ever looked like a woman. She locked the
doors of her home till the cruel war should be ended, and he whose
love made her home should return. Till then, if indeed it should ever
be, she left her happiness there in the empty, silent rooms and
sallied off. She had disposed of her stock and things like that, folks
not bein' surprised at it, bein' she wuz alone, but all to once she
disappeared, utterly and entirely, nobody hearn of her and folks
thought that mebby she had wandered off in her grief and put an end to
her life. Not one word wuz hearn of her until lo and behold! the
strange news come, Arvilly's husband wuz killed in a drunken brawl in
a licensed Canteen down in Cuba and Arvilly had deserted from the
army, and of course bein' a woman they couldn't touch her for it. That
wuz the first we ever knowed that she wuz in the army.

CHAPTER VIII

Arvilly deserted from the army and gloried in it; she said, bein' a
woman born, she had never had a right, and now she took it. After her
husband wuz buried, and her hull life, too, she thought for a spell,
she deserted, but bein' ketched and court-martialed, she appeared
before the officers in her own skirt and bask waist and dared 'em to
touch her. Waitstill Webb, the young sweetheart of the man that shot
her husband, wuz with her. Good land! Arvilly didn't lay up nothin'
aginst her or him; he wuz drunk as a fool when he fired the shot. He
didn't know what he wuz doin'; he wuz made irresponsible by the law,
till he did the deed, and then made responsible by the same law and
shot. Waitstill wuz named from a Puritan great-great-aunt, whose
beauty and goodness had fell onto her, poor