“I beg your pardon, Miss,” began the soldier, with a salute, “but has old Jake annoyed you?”

“Oh, not at all,” she answered, as calmly as she could.  “He only startled me for a moment; that is all.  I was here alone, foolishly, perhaps—­”

“Oh, no, that’s all right,” interrupted the soldier.  “We want the visitors to go about as they please, alone or in company.  Old Jake’s as harmless as a kitten.  He isn’t just right up here,” he said, touching his head, and speaking in low tones.

“I thought as much,” responded Alice, with a smile.

“He’s perfectly harmless,” went on the soldier, looking out to see the aged negro shuffling off.  “You see, he used to be a slave in some Southern family,” the army man explained.  “He was given his freedom, but never took it, and they say he went insane when his mistress died.  He had taken care of her since she was a baby, and he took it very much to heart.”

“Poor old man,” murmured Alice.

“Yes, we all like him around here,” the soldier continued.  “He has a notion now that his ‘little mistress,’ as he calls her, is only lost, and he keeps searching for her.  Sometimes he scares the lady visitors, so we try to keep him out of the lonely parts of the fort.  But he must have slipped in here when no one was watching.  I’ll give him a good lecture.”

“Oh, please don’t be harsh to him!” pleaded Alice.  “Really he did nothing!”

“But he scared you, Miss.”

“Oh, not much.  Only for a second.  Then I guessed what his trouble was.  Please say you won’t scold him!” she pleaded.

“Well, I guess I’ll have to, if you ask me that way, Miss,” said the soldier with the air and manner of a Southern colonel.  “We can’t refuse the ladies anything, you know,” and he bowed and smiled in a frank manner that pleased Alice.

“Then you won’t punish him?” she asked.

“Punish him?  Oh, no, Miss.  Old Jake is just like a child.  He sort of lives in the fort.  No, I won’t do any more than tell him to keep away from here, for them’s the captain’s orders, Miss.”

“All right,” she answered.  “And now I think I had better join my friends.  What a horrible place this is!” she added, with a backward look at the dungeon.

“You may well say that, Miss.  But it isn’t so bad now as it must have been in the old days.  It’s a queer world, that men would make such a place to put a fellow creature in,” and with this somewhat philosophical remark the soldier saluted again, as Alice bade him good-bye.

“Why, where have you been?” Ruth asked, as sister appeared.  “We have been looking all over for you.  Where were you?”

“In jail!”

“Jail!  Alice, don’t joke about such things.”

“No, sister mine, I was only in a deep, dark dismal dungeon, and I had such a romantic adventure.”

“Oh, do tell us about it!” begged Miss Pennington.

“Did you meet a handsome prisoner?” asked Miss Dixon.