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The darkness was quite lifted now, up and down the levee, and Idyl, standing in the shadow, could see groups of people weeping, wringing their hands, as Captain Doc, pompon triumphant, came in sight galloping down the road.

In a second more he would pass the spot where she stood–stood unseen, seeing the sorrow of the people, heeding the challenge of the guns. The wagon was at hand.

With a faint, childish scream, raising her thin arms heavenward, she plunged forward and fell headlong in its path.

The victory was hers.

The tinselled captain was now tender surgeon, doctor, friend.

In his own arms he raised the limp little form from beneath the wheel, while the shabby gray coats of a dozen “Riffraffs,” laid over the cannon-balls in the wagon, made her a hero’s bed; and Captain Doc, seizing the reins, turned the horses cautiously, and drove in haste back to his drug-store.

Farragut’s fleet and “the honor of the Riffraffs” were forgotten in the presence of this frail embodiment of death.

Upon his own bed beside an open window he laid her, and while his eager company became surgeon’s assistants, he tenderly bound her wounds.

For several hours she lay in a stupor, and when she opened her eyes the captain knelt beside her. Mrs. Magwire stood near, noisily weeping.

“Is it saved?” she asked, when at length she opened her eyes.

Captain Doc, thinking her mind was wandering, raised her head, and pointed to the river, now ablaze with light.

“See,” said he. “See the steamboats loaded with burning cotton, and the great ship meeting them; that is a Yankee gunboat! See, it is passing.”

“And you didn’t shoot? And are the people glad?”

“No, we didn’t shoot. You fell and got hurt at the dark turn by the acacia bushes, where you hang your little lantern on dark nights. Some one ought to have hung one for you to-night. How did it happen, child?”

“It didn’t happen. I did it on purpose. I knew if I got hurt you would stop and cure me, and not fire at the boats. I wanted to save–to save the plan–“

While the little old man raised a glass to the child’s lips his hand shook, and something like a sob escaped him.

“Listen, little one,” he whispered, while his lips quivered. “I am an old fool, but not a fiend–not a devil. Not a gun would have fired. I wet all the powder. I didn’t want anybody to say the Riffraffs flinched at the last minute. But you–oh, my God!” His voice sank even lower. “You have given your young life for my folly.”

She understood.

“I haven’t got any pain–only–I can’t move. I thought I’d get hurt worse than I am–and not so much. I feel as if I were going up–and up–through the red–into the blue. And the moon is coming sideways to me. And her face–it is in it–just like the picture.” She cast her eyes about the room as if half conscious of her surroundings. “Will they–will they love me now?”

Mrs. Magwire, sobbing aloud, fell upon her knees beside the bed.

“God love her, the heavenly child!” she wailed. “She was niver intinded for this worrld. Sure, an’ I love ye, darlint, jist the same as Mary Ann an’ Kitty–an’ betther, too, to make up the loss of yer own mother, God rest her.”

Great tears rolled down the cheeks of the dying child, and that heavenly light which seems a forecast of things unseen shone from her brilliant eyes.

She laid her thin hand upon Mrs. Magwire’s head, buried now upon the bed beside her.

“Lay the little blanket on me, please–when I go–“

She turned her eyes upon the sky.

“She worked it for me–the ‘Darling’ on it. The moon is coming again–sideways. It is her face.”

So, through the red of the fiery sky, up into the blue, passed the pure spirit of little Saint Idyl.

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