r dutiful spouse an hour earlier. Then she
proceeded to lay the table, and put the rooms in order against the
major's coming, and woe betide him if cigar stubs littered the bachelor
sittingroom or unrinsed glasses and half empty decanters told of even
moderate symposium over night. Returning that eventful morning from his
office at first call for reveille, after seeing the last of Ray's
gallant troop as it moved away across the dim vista of the northward
prairie, Webb had been concerned to find his decanter of Monongahela
half empty on the pantry table and the _debris_ of a hurried feast on
every side. Kennedy, who had begun in moderation, must have felt the
need of further creature comfort after his bout with the stalwart Sioux,
and had availed himself to the limit of his capacity of the major's
invitation. Webb's first thought was to partially remove the traces of
that single-handed spree; then, refilling the decanter from the big
five-gallon demijohn, kept under lock and key in the cupboard--for
Michael, too, had at long intervals weaknesses of his own--he was
thinking how best to protect Kennedy from the consequences of his,
Webb's, rash invitation when Schreiber's knock was heard.

Ten minutes more and the sergeant was back again.

"Sir, I have to report that Trooper Kennedy has not been seen about the
quarters," said he.

"Then try the stables, sergeant," answered the veteran campaigner, and
thither would Schreiber next have gone, even had he not been sent. And,
sure enough, there was Kennedy, with rueful face and a maudlin romaunt
about a moonlit meeting with a swarm of painted Sioux, over which the
stable guard were making merry and stirring the trooper's soul to wrath
ungovernable.

"I can prove ut," he howled, to the accompaniment of clinching fists and
bellicose lunges at the laughing tormentors nearest him. "I can whip the
hide off'n the scut that says I didn't. Ask Lootn't Field, bejabers! He
saw it. Ask--Oh, Mother of God! what's this I'm sayin'?"--And there,
with stern, rebuking gaze, stood the man they knew and feared, every
soul of them, as they did no commissioned soldier in the ----th,
Sergeant Schreiber, the redoubtable, and Schreiber had heard the insane
and damaging boast.

"Come with me, Kennedy," was all he said, and Kennedy snatched his
battered felt headgear down over his eyes and tacked woefully after his
swift-striding master, without ever another word.

But it was to his own room Schr