which seemed
to lie without banks in the green meadows where wild elk fed with the
shy Indian cattle; over the white hills where the earth gave under the
hoofs like new-fallen snow. But when one came to it through the
expanding, dusty miles, the reward of his long ride was not in keeping
with his effort.

Certainly, privates and subalterns could get drunk there, as speedily
as in the centers of refinement, but there were no gentlemanly
diversions at which an officer could dispel the gloom of his sour days
in garrison.

The rough-cheeked girls of that high-wind country were well enough for
cowboys to swing in their wild dances; just a rung above the squaws on
the reservation in the matter of loquacity and of gum. Hardly the sort
for a man who had the memory of white gloves and gleaming shoulders,
and the traditions of the service to maintain.

Of course there was the exception of Nola Chadron, but she was not of
Meander and the railroad's end, and she came only in flashes of summer
brightness, like a swift, gay bird. But when Nola was at the
ranchhouse on the river the gloom lifted over the post, and the sour
leaven in the hearts of unmarried officers became as sweet as manna in
the cheer of the unusual social outlet thus provided.

Nola kept the big house in a blaze of joy while she nested there
through the summer days. The sixteen miles which stretched between it
and the post ran out like a silver band before those who rode into the
smile of her welcome, and when she flitted away to Cheyenne,
champagne, and silk hats in the autumn, a grayness hovered again over
the military post in the corner of the reservation.

Later than usual Nola had lingered on this fall, and the social outlet
had remained open, like a navigable river over which the threat of ice
hung but had not yet fallen. There were not lacking those who held
that the lodestone which kept her there at the ranchhouse, when the
gaieties of the season beckoned elsewhere, was in the breast of Major
Cuvier King. Fatal infatuation, said the married ladies at the post,
knowing, as everybody knew in the service, that Major King was
betrothed to Frances Landcraft, the colonel's daughter.

No matter for any complications which might come of it, Nola had
remained on, and the major had smiled on her, and ridden with her, and
cut high capers in the dance, all pending the return of Frances and
her mother from their summering at Bar Harbor in compliance with the
fami