edge of the plateau, and
descended the winding pathway to the humble quarters of the married
soldiers, nestling in the sheltered flats between the garrison proper
and the bold bluffs that again close bordered the rushing stream. And
here at Sergeant Foster's doorway Esther parted from the elders, and was
welcomed by shrieks of joy from three sturdy little cherubs--the
sergeant's olive branches, and here, as the last notes of tattoo went
echoing away under the vast and spangled sky, one by one her charges
closed their drooping lids and dropped to sleep and left their gentle
friend and reader to her own reflections.

There was a soldier dance that night in one of the vacant messrooms.
Flint's two companies were making the best of their isolation, and
found, as is not utterly uncommon, quite a few maids and matrons among
the households of the absent soldiery quite willing to be consoled and
comforted. There were bright lights, therefore, further along the edge
of the steep, beyond those of the hospital, and the squeak of fiddle and
drone of 'cello, mingled with the plaintive piping of the flute, were
heard at intervals through the silence of the wintry night. No tramp of
sentry broke the hush about the little rift between the heights--the
major holding that none was necessary where there were so many dogs.
Most of the soldiers' families had gone to the dance; all of the younger
children were asleep; even the dogs were still, and so, when at ten
o'clock Esther tiptoed from the children's bedside and stood under the
starlight, the murmur of the Platte was the only sound that reached her
ears until, away over at the southwest gate the night guards began the
long-drawn heralding of the hour. "Ten o'clock and all's well" it went
from post to post along the west and northward front, but when Number
Six, at the quartermaster's storehouse near the southeast corner, should
have taken up the cry where it was dropped by Number Five, afar over
near the flagstaff, there was unaccountable silence. Six did not utter a
sound.

Looking up from the level of "Sudstown," as it had earlier been named,
Esther could see the black bulk of the storehouse close to the edge of
the plateau. Between its westward gable end and the porch of the
hospital lay some fifty yards of open space, and through this gap now
gleamed a spangled section of the western heavens. Along the bluff, just
under the crest, ran a pathway that circled the southeastward corne