“You might let him write in your autograph album,” said the woman child, brightly, to Miss Lansdale.

“I know what he’d write if he got the chance,” I added incitingly.  But it did not avail.  Miss Lansdale remained incurious and merely said, “Long golden braids,” as one trying to picture them.

“And later a little row of curls over each ear, and a tiny chain with a locket around the neck.  I had a picture once—­”

“You have had many pictures.”

“Yes—­two are many if you’ve had nothing else.”

But she was now regarding the woman child with a curious, close look, almost troubled in its intensity.

“Do you look like your mother?” she asked.

“Papa says I do, and Uncle Maje thinks so too.  She was very pretty,” This came with an unconscious placidity.

“She looks almost as her mother’s picture did,” I said.

When the child had gone, Miss Lansdale searched my face long before speaking.  She seemed to hesitate for words, and at length to speak of other matters than those which might have perplexed her.

“Why did they call you ’Horsehead’?” she asked almost kindly.

“I never asked.  It seemed to be a common understanding.  Doubtless there was good reason for it, as good as there is for calling Budlow ‘Fatty.’”

“What did you do?” she asked again.

“I went to the war with what I could take—­nothing but a picture.”

“And you lost that?”

“Yes—­under peculiar circumstances.  It seemed a kind thing to do at the time.”

“And you came back with—­”

“With yours, Little Miss!”

Some excitement throbbed between us so that I had involuntarily emphasized my words.  Briefly her eyes clung to mine, and very slowly we relaxed from that look.

“I only wanted to say,” she began presently, “that I shall have to believe your absurd tale of my picture being with you before you saw me.  Something makes me credit it—­a strange little notion that I have carried that child’s picture in my own mind.”

“We are even, then,” I answered, “only you are thinking more things than you say.  That isn’t fair.”

But she only nodded her head inscrutably.

CHAPTER XXVI

A LITTLE MYSTERY IS SOLVED

The significance of Miss Lansdale’s manner, rather than her words, ran through my darkened thoughts like a thread as I played the game that night.  After a third defeat this thread seemed to guide me to daylight from a tortuously winding cavern.  At first the thing was of an amazing simplicity.

In a far room was a chest filled with forgotten odds and ends that had come back with me years before.  I ran to it, and from under bundles of letters, old family trinkets, a canteen, a pair of rusty pistols, and other such matters, I brought forth an ambrotype—­the kind that was mounted in a black case of pressed rubber and closed with a spring.