over Mahailey it cast a spell. She was so dazzled by it that all the time Claude was at home she never once managed to examine it in detail. Before she got past his puttees, her powers of observation were befogged by excitement, and her wits began to jump about like monkeys in a cage. She had expected his uniform to be blue, like those she remembered, and when he walked into the kitchen last night she scarcely knew what to make of him. After Mrs. Wheeler explained to her that American soldiers didn’t wear blue now, Mahailey repeated to herself that these brown clothes didn’t show the dust, and that Claude would never look like the bedraggled men who used to stop to drink at her mother’s spring.
“Them leather leggins is to keep the briars from scratchin’ you, ain’t they? I ’spect there’s an awful lot of briars over there, like them long blackberry vines in the fields in Virginia. Your mudder says the soldiers git lice now, like they done in our war. You jist carry a little bottle of coal-oil in your pocket an’ rub it on your head at night. It keeps the nits from hatchin’.”
Over the flour barrel in the corner Mahailey had tacked a Red Cross poster; a charcoal drawing of an old woman poking with a stick in a pile of plaster and twisted timbers that had once been her home. Claude went over to look at it while he dried his hands.
“Where did you get your picture?”
“She’s over there where you’re goin’, Mr. Claude. There she is, huntin’ for somethin’ to cook with; no stove nor no dishes nor nothin’—everything all broke up. I reckon she’ll be mighty glad to see you comin’.”
Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Mahailey whispered hastily, “Don’t forgit about the coal-oil, and don’t you
