Percy's Holidays by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

PERCY, or Perseverance, Denham was the orphan niece of Miss Zoe Devine, who lived at Bridgeport, or "The Bridge," as the place was familiarly called.

Percy's father had been an officer in the regular army. He was a man respected and honoured in the army and out of it, and was in a fair way of rising in his profession, when his career was cut short by an Apache bullet; and his young wife was left without any earthly consolations except her little girl, and the thought that at least her husband had been granted a swift and easy passage to heaven, instead of falling alive, like some of his less fortunate companions, into the hands of those amiable savages, whom, by the way, he had always befriended to the extent of his power.