ce as
though he would ask could he, the General, know the true character of the
woman he had honored above all her sisterhood on board, in thus taking
her to the bridge whereon neither officer nor man nor nurse nor army wife
had presumed to set foot on all the six days' run from San Francisco, as
though he would ask if the General knew just what she was, this blithe,
dainty, winsome little thing that nestled so confidingly--indeed, so
snugly--close to his battered side, and who had virtually taken
possession of him in the face of an envious and not too silent circle of
her own sex. Truth to tell, the Chief would rather have escaped. He was
but an indifferent sailor, and the Queen's long, lazy roll over the ocean
surges was exciting in his inner consciousness a longing for cracked ice
and champagne. He had known her but the few days the Queen remained in
port, coaling and preparing for the onward voyage across the broad
Pacific; but a great functionary of the general government had told him a
pathetic tale the very day of his first peep at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel,
had given him a capital dinner at that famous hostelry, whereat she
appeared in charming attire, and in a flow of spirits simply
irresistible. Her sallies of wit had made him roar with delight; her
mimicry of one or two conscientious but acidulated dames who had come
over on the Queen, bound as nurses for Manila, had tickled him to the
verge of apoplexy; but when later she backed him into the coolest corner
of the "lanai" with the plash of fountain close at hand, and the sweet
music of Berger's famous band floating softly on the evening air, and
told him how her father had loved to talk of his, the General's, dash and
daring in the great days of the great war, and led him on to tell of his
campaigns in the Shenandoah and the West, listening with dilated eyes and
parted lips, the campaigner himself was captivated, and she had her will.
A great senator had told him how she had come thither to nurse a gallant
young officer in her husband's regiment, how she had pulled the boy
through the perils of brain fever until he was now convalescent and going
on to rejoin his comrades in Manila, and she, she was pining to reach her
husband now serving on General Drayton's staff. Other women were aboard
the Queen; could not General Crabb find room for her? It is hard for a
soldier to refuse a pretty woman--or a prominent member of the committee
on military affairs. There was n