with me constantly. Even this meeting, which was only the result of an
accident, I had been seeking for three years. I find you here under your
own peaceful vine and fig-tree, and yet three years ago you came to me
out of the thunder-cloud of battle."

"My good gracious!" said Miss Sally.

She had been clasping her knee with her linked fingers, but separated
them and leaned backward on the sofa with affected consternation, but
an expression of growing amusement in her bright eyes. Courtland saw the
mistake of his tone, but it was too late to change it now. He handed
her the locket and the letter, and briefly, and perhaps a little more
seriously, recounted the incident that had put him in possession of
them. But he entirely suppressed the more dramatic and ghastly details,
and his own superstition and strange prepossession towards her.

Miss Sally took the articles without a tremor, or the least deepening
or paling of the delicate, faint suffusion of her cheek. When she had
glanced over the letter, which appeared to be brief, she said, with
smiling, half-pitying tranquillity:--

"Yes!--it WAS that poor Chet Brooks, sure! I heard that he was killed
at Snake River. It was just like him to rush in and get killed the first
pop! And all for nothing, too,--pure foolishness!"

Shocked, yet relieved, but uneasy under both sensations, Courtland went
on blindly:

"But he was not the only one, Miss Dows. There was another man picked up
who also had your picture."