“By that time she was in a fit.  ’They’ll be here in two minutes; they’re Confederate officers.  Oh, and you mustn’t cross at Kelly’s Ford—­take the ford above it’—­and she thumped me excitedly with the hand I held.  I laughed, and she burst out again:  ‘They’ll take you—­oh, please go!’

“‘Tell me, then,’ said I, and she stopped half a second, and gasped again, and looked up in my eyes and said it.  ‘I love you,’ said she.  And she meant it.

“‘Give me a kiss,’ said I, and I leaned close to her, but she pulled away.

“‘Oh, no—­oh, please go now,’ she begged.

“‘All right,’ said I, ‘but you don’t know what you’re missing,’ and I slid out of the back door at the second the Southerners came in at the front.

“There were bushes back there, and I crawled behind them and looked through into the window, and what do you suppose I saw?  I saw the biggest and best-looking man of the three walk up to the girl who’d just told me she loved me, and I saw her put up her face and give him the kiss she wouldn’t give me.  Well, I went smashing down to the woods, making such a rumpus that if those officers had been half awake they’d have been after me twice over.  I was so maddened at the sight of that kiss that I didn’t realize what I was doing or that I was endangering the lives of my men.  ‘Of course,’ said I to myself, ’it’s her brother or her cousin,’ but I knew it was a hundred to one that it wasn’t, and I was in a mighty bad temper.

“I got my men away from the neighborhood quietly, and we rode pretty cautiously all that afternoon, I knew the road leading to Kelly’s Ford, and I bore to the north, away from there, for I trusted the girl and believed I’d be safe if I followed her orders.  She’d saved my life twice that day, so I had reason to trust her.  But all the time as I jogged along I was wondering about that man, and wondering what the dickens she was up to, anyway, and why she was travelling in the same direction that I was, and where she was going—­and over and over I wondered if I’d over see her again.  I felt sure I would, though—­I couldn’t imagine not seeing her, after what she’d said.  I didn’t even know her name, except that the old negro had called her ‘Miss Lindy.’  I said that a lot of times to myself as I rode, with the men’s bits jingling at my buck and their horses’ hoofs thud-thudding.  ’Lindy—­Miss Lindy—­Linda—­my Linda—­I said it half aloud.  It kept first-rate time to the hoof-beats—­’Lindy—­Miss Lindy.’

“I wondered, too, why she wouldn’t let me cross the Rappahannock by Kelly’s Ford, for I had reason to think there’d be a Union post on the east side of the river there, but there was a sense of brains and capability about the girl, as well as charm—­in fact, that’s likely to be a large part of any real charm—­and so I trusted to her.

[Illustration:  “I got behind a turn and fired as a man came on alone.”]