ly traditions. Now Frances was back again, and fortune had thrown
a sunburst of beauty into the post by centering her and Nola here at
once. Nola was the guest of the colonel's daughter, and there were
flutterings in uniformed breasts.

Beef day was an event at the agency which never grew old to the people
at the post. Without beef day they must have dwindled off to acidulous
shadows, as the Indians who depended upon it for more solid sustenance
would have done in the event of its discontinuation by a paternal
government.

There were phases of Indian life and character which one never saw
save on beef day, which fell on Wednesday of each week. Guests at the
post watched the bright picture with the keen interest of a pageant on
the stage; tourists came over by stage from Meander in the summer
months by the score to be present; the resident officers, and their
wives and families--such as had them--found in it an ever-recurring
source of interest and relief from the tedium of days all alike.

This beef day, the morning following the meeting between Saul Chadron
and his mysterious guest, a chattering group stood on the veranda of
Colonel Landcraft's house in the bright friendly sun. They were
waiting for horses to make the short journey to the agency--for one's
honesty was questioned, his sanity doubted, if he went afoot in that
country even a quarter of a mile--and gayest among them was Nola
Chadron, the sun in her fair, springing hair.

Nola's crown reached little higher than a proper soldier's heart, but
what she lacked in stature she supplied in plastic perfection of body
and vivacity of face. There was a bounding joyousness of life in her;
her eager eyes reflecting only the anticipated pleasures of today.
There was no shadow of yesterday's regret in them, no cloud of
tomorrow's doubt.

On the other balance there was Frances Landcraft, taller by half a
head, soldierly, too, as became her lineage, in the manner of lifting
her chin in what seemed a patrician scorn of small things such as a
lady should walk the world unconscious of. The brown in her hair was
richer than the clear agate of her eyes; it rippled across her ear
like the scroll of water upon the sand.

There was a womanly dignity about her, although the threshold of
girlhood must not have been far behind her that bright autumnal
morning. Her nod was equal to a stave of Nola's chatter, her smile
worth a league of the light laughter from that bounding litt