“Curley, you hold the horses,” he said, “and Dixon, you tell the men in the other detachments to seize anybody trying to escape.  Sergeant, you and I and the others will enter the house.  Break in the lock with the butt of your rifle, sergeant!  No, I see it’s not locked!”

He turned the bolt, and, the door swinging in, they passed into an empty hall.  Here they paused and listened, which was a wise thing for a man to do when he entered the house of an enemy.  Dick’s sense of hearing was not much inferior to that of the sergeant, and while at first they heard nothing, they detected presently a faint click, click.  He could not imagine what made the odd sound, and, listening as hard as he could, he could detect no other with it.

He pushed open a door that led into the hall and he and his men entered a large room with windows on the side, opening upon a rose garden.  It was a pleasant room with a high ceiling, and old-fashioned, dignified furniture.  A blaze of sunlight poured in from the windows, and, where a sash was raised, came the faint, thrilling perfume of roses, a perfume to which Dick was peculiarly susceptible.  Yet, for years afterward, the odor of roses brought back to him that house and that room.

He thought at first that the room, although the faint clicking noise continued, contained no human being.  But presently he saw sitting at a table by the open window a woman whose gray dress and gray hair blended so nearly with the gray colors of the chamber that even a soldier could have been excused for not seeing her at once.  Her head and body were perfectly still, but her hands were moving rapidly.  She was knitting, and it was the click of her needles that they had heard.

She did not look up as Dick entered, and, taking off his cap, he stood, somewhat abashed.  He knew at once by her dress and face, and the dignity, disclosed even by the manner in which she sat, that she was a great lady, one of those great ladies of old Virginia who were great ladies in fact.  She was rather small, Martha Washington might have looked much like her, and she knitted steadily on, without showing by the least sign that she was aware of the presence of Union soldiers.

A long and embarrassed silence followed.  Dick judged that she was about sixty-five years of age, though she seemed strong and he felt that she was watching them alertly from covert eyes.  There was no indication that anyone else was in the building, but it did not seem likely that a great lady of Virginia would be left alone in her house, with a Union force marching by.

He approached, bowed and said: 

“Madame!”

She raised her head and looked at him slowly from head to foot, and then back again.  They were fierce old eyes, and Dick felt as if they burned him, but he held his ground knowing that he must.  Then she turned back to her knitting, and the needles clicked steadily as before.