Her sufferings, whether imaginary or real, were sufficiently acute to
drive her into the only form of escape which once had been possible to
friendless negroes. She became a runaway. With a bundle tied to the
end of a stick over her shoulder, just as the old prints represent it,
she fled from her homelessness and loneliness, from her ignoble past,
and the heart-disappointing termination of it. Following a railroad
track, journeying afoot, sleeping by the roadside, she lived on until
she came to the one familiar landmark in life to her--a sick woman,
but a white one. And so, progressing from patient to patient (it was a
time when sick white women studded the country like mile-posts), she
arrived at a little town, a kind of a refuge for soldiers' wives and
widows. She never traveled further. She could not. Always, as in the
pen, some emergency of pain and illness held her.

That is all. She is still there. The poor, poor women of that stricken
region say that little Mammy was the only alleviation God left them
after Sheridan passed through; and the richer ones say very much the
same thing--

But one should hear her tell it herself, as has been said, on a cold,
gloomy winter day in the country, the fire glimmering on the hearth;
the overworked husband in the fields; the baby quiet at last; the
mother uneasy, restless, thought-driven; the soft black hand rubbing
backward and forward, rubbing out aches and frets and nervousness.

The eyelids droop; the firelight plays fantasies on the bed-curtains;
the ear drops words, sentences; one gets confused--one sleeps--one
dreams.