HE’S all right; you can look for him here right along now, any day; he was hurt a leetle, but he’s as peart an’ chipper now as a blue-jay on a hick’ry limb; yes, he’s a-comin’ right smack home!”

This was the gist of the assurances which Ni vouchsafed to the first rush of eager questions—to his sister, and M’rye, and Janey Wilcox.

Abner had held a little aloof, to give the weaker sex a chance. Now he reasserted himself once more: “Stan’ back, now, and give the young man breathin’ room. Janey, hand a chair for’ard—that’s it. Now set ye down, Ni, an’ take your own time, an’ tell us all about it. So you reely found him, eh?”

“Pshaw! there ain’t anything to that,” expostulated Ni, seating himself with nonchalance, and tilting back his chair. “That was easy as rollin’ off a log. But what’s the matter here? That’s what knocks me. We—that is to say, I—come up on a freight train to a ways beyond Juno Junction, an’ got the conductor to slow up and let me drop off, an’ footed it over the hill. It was jest about broad daylight when I turned the divide. Then I began lookin’ for your house, an’ I’m lookin’ for it still. There’s a hole out there, full o’ snow an’ smoke, but nary a house. How’d it happen?”

“‘Lection bonfire—high wind—woodshed must ‘a’ caught,” replied Abner, sententiously. “So you reely got down South, eh?”

“An’ Siss here, too,” commented Ni, with provoking disregard for the farmer’s suggestions; “a reg’lar family party. An’, hello!”

His roving eye had fallen upon the recumbent form on the made-up bed, under the muffling blankets, and he lifted his sandy wisps of eyebrows in inquiry.

“Sh! It’s father,” explained Esther. “He isn’t feeling very well. I think he’s asleep.”

The boy’s freckled, whimsical face melted upon reflection into a distinct grin. “Why,” he said, “you’ve been havin’ a reg’lar old love-feast up here. I guess it was that that set the house on fire! An’ speakin’ o’ feasts, if you’ve got a mouthful o’ somethin’ to eat handy—”

The women were off like a shot to the impromptu larder at the far end of the barn.

“Well, thin,” put in Hurley, taking advantage of their absence, “an’ had ye the luck to see anny rale fightin’?”

“Never mind that,” said Abner; “when he gits around to it he’ll tell us everything. But, fust of all—why, he knows what I want to hear about.”

“Why, the last time I talked with you, Abner—” Ni began, squinting up one of his eyes and giving a quaint drawl to his words.

“That’s a good while ago,” said the farmer, quietly.

“Things have took a change, eh?” inquired Ni.

“That’s neither here nor there,” replied Abner, somewhat testily. “You oughtn’t to need so dummed much explainin’. I’ve told you what I want specially to hear. An’ that’s what we all want to hear.”

When the women had returned, and Ni, with much deliberation, had filled both hands with selected eatables, the recital at last got under way. It progress was blocked from time to time by sheer force of tantalizing perversity on the part of the narrator, and it suffered steadily from the incidental hitches of mastication; but such as it was we listened to it with all our ears, sitting or standing about, and keeping our eyes intently upon the freckled young hero.

“It wasn’t so much of a job to git down there as I’d figured on,” Ni said, between mouthfuls. “I got along on freight trains—once worked my way a while on a hand-car—as far as Albany, an’ on down to New York on a river-boat, cheap, an’ then, after foolin’ round a few days, I hitched up with the Sanitary Commission folks, an’ got them to let me sail on one o’ their boats round to ’Napolis. I thought I was goin’ to die most o’ the voyage, but I didn’t, you see, an’ when I struck ’Napolis I hung around Camp Parole there quite a spell, talkin’ with fellers that’d bin pris’ners down in Richmond an’ got exchanged an’ sent North. They said there was a whole slew of our fellers down there still that’d been brought in after Antietam. They didn’t know none o’ their names, but they said they’d all be sent North in time, in exchange for Johnny Rebs that we’d captured. An’ so I waited round—”

“You might have written!” interrupted Esther, reproachfully.

“What’d bin the good o’ writin’? I hadn’t anything to tell. Besides writin’ letters is for girls. Well, one day a man come up from Libby—that’s the prison at Richmond—an’ he said there was a tall feller there from York State, a farmer, an’ he died. He thought the name was Birch, but it might’a’ been Beech—or Body-Maple, for that matter. I s’pose you’d like to had me write that home!”

“No—oh, no!” murmured Esther, speaking the sense of all the company.

“Well, then I waited some more, an’ kep’ on waitin’, an’ then waited agin, until bimeby, one fine day, along comes Mr. Blue-jay himself. There here was, stan’in’ up on the paddle-box with a face on him as long as your arm, an’ I sung out, ‘Way there, Agrippa Hill!’ an’ he come mighty nigh failin’ head over heels into the water. So then he come off, an’ we shook han’s, an’ went up to the commissioners to see about his exchange, an’—an’ as soon’s that’s fixed, an’ the papers drawn up all correct, why, he’ll come home. An’ that’s all there is to it.”

“And even then you never wrote!” said Esther, plaintively.

“Hold on a minute,” put in Abner. “You say he’s comin’ home. That wouldn’t be unless he was disabled. They’d keep him to fight agin, till his time was up. Come, now, tell the truth—he’s be’n hurt bad!”

Ni shook his unkempt red head. “No, no,” he said. “This is how it was. Fust he was fightin’ in a cornfield, an’ him an’ Bi Truax, they got chased out, an’ lost their regiment, an’ got in with some other fellers, and then they all waded a creek breast-high, an’ had to run up a long stretch o’ slopin’ ploughed ground to capture a battery they was on top o’ the knoll. But they didn’t see a regiment of sharp-shooters layin’ hidden behind a rail-fence, an’ these fellers riz up all to once an’ give it to ’em straight, an’ they wilted right there, an’ laid down, an’ there they was after dusk when the rebs come out an’ started lookin’ round for guns an’ blankets an’ prisoners. Most of ’em was dead, or badly hurt, but they was a few who’d simply lain there in the hollow because it’d have bin death to git up. An’ Jeff was one o’ them.”

“You said yourself ’t he had been hurt—some,” interposed M’rye, with snapping eyes.

“Jest a scratch on his arm,” declared Ni. “Well, then they marched the well ones back to the rear of the reb line, an’ there they jest skinned ’em of everything they had—watch an’ jack-knife an’ wallet an’ everything—an’ put ’em to sleep on the bare ground. Next day they started ’em out on the march toward Richmond, an’ after four or five days o’ that, they got to a railroad, and there was cattle cars for ’em to ride the rest o’ the way in. An’ that’s how it was.”

“No,” said Abner, sternly; “you haven’t told us. How badly is he hurt?”

“Well,” replied Ni, “it was only a scratch, as I said, but it got worse on that march, an’ I s’pose it wasn’t tended to anyways decently, an’ so—an’ so—”

M’rye had sprung to her feet and stood now drawn up to her full height, with her sharp nose in air as if upon some strange scent, and her eyes fairly glowing in eager excitement. All at once she made a bound past us and ran to the doors, furiously digging her fingers in the crevice between them, then, with a superb sweep of the shoulders, sending them both rattling back on their wheels with a bang.

“I knew it!” she screamed in triumph.

We who looked out beheld M’rye’s black hair and brown calico dress suddenly suffer a partial eclipse of pale blue, which for the moment seemed in some way a part of the bright winter sky beyond. Then we saw that it was a soldier who had his arm about M’rye, and his cap bent down tenderly over the head she had laid on his shoulder.

Our Jeff had come home.

A general instinct rooted us to our places and kept us sile............