it's Silver Shield that's melted
away. Everything we had in the world."

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST CALL

Fort Reynolds, as has been told in the earlier story of George Graham's
cadet days, lay among the eastward foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains,
with a bustling little frontier city only six miles away down the
winding valley of what was, in the early eighties, a clear, cold, and
beautiful mountain stream that shone in the sun like molten silver.

Silver Run it was called when Uncle Sam built the picturesque frontier
fort of hewn logs and unseasoned pine soon after the Civil War. Silver
Run, cold, pure, and glistening, it remained when Fort Reynolds became
an important military post. Then the --th Cavalry took station at
Reynolds, and there Geordie Graham found them when, with his father and
mother and "Bud," he had come from cold Montana to the finest station
they yet had known, and to the firmest friends, many of whom they had
met before, when Geordie, as a little boy, was "Corporal Pops" to every
man at old Camp Sandy.

But Silver Run, though it ran more silver than it ever knew before, was
beautiful no longer. Mines of remarkable value, mines of gold and
silver, had been discovered twenty and thirty miles back in the
mountains. Mining towns had sprung up along the steep and rocky banks.
Mining methods had turned a limpid stream into a turbid torrent. Two
railways had run their lines, hewing, blasting, boring, and tunnelling
up the narrow valley, first to reach the mines and finally to merge in
a "cut-off" to the great Transcontinental, so that now huge trains of
Pullmans went straining slowly up-grade past the site of old Fort
Reynolds, or came coasting down with smoking tires and fire-spitting
brake-shoes, and between the loss of the water for his horses, and the
hemming in of his rifle-ranges by rail right of way, Uncle Sam
declared Fort Reynolds no longer tenable for cavalry. The regiment had
been sent elsewhere, and only a quartermaster-sergeant and a squad of
men remained.

Yet Reynolds stood in the midst of thriving industries and swarming
men. The First National Bank in town had now a marble front and a
thousand depositors. The town was now a city and a railway centre, and
the backbone of its business was no longer cattle, but mines and
mining, full of fabulous wealth for those "on the inside," but of dark
and devious measures for those "on the outside" or away, and of these
were half a dozen army