of the most pronounced character. He was the
grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian
days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circumstance puzzling
only to himself. He was a man of small bickerings, exactions, forms.
He fussed with civilians as a regular thing when in command of posts
within the precincts of civilization, and to serve under him, as
officer or man, was a chafing and galling experience.

If ever there was an unpopular man in the service, then that man was
Colonel John Hancock Landcraft, direct descendant--he could figure it
out as straight as a bayonet--of the heavy-handed signer himself. His
years and his empty desires bore heavily on the colonel. The trespass
of time he resented; the barrenness of his hope he grieved.

There he was in those Septembral days, galloping along toward the age
limit and retirement. Within a few weeks he would be subject to call
before the retiring board any day, and there was nothing in his
short-remaining time of service to shore up longer the hope of
advancement in rank as compensatory honor in his retirement. He was a
testy little old man, charged for instant explosion, and it was
generally understood by everybody but the colonel himself that the
department had sent him off to Fort Shakie to get him out of the way.

On the afternoon of the day following Nola Chadron's ball, when Major
King returned to Frances the glove that Alan Macdonald had carried
away from the garden, Colonel Landcraft was a passenger on the mail
stage from Meander to the post. The colonel had been on official
business to the army post at Cheyenne. Instead of telegraphing to his
own post the intelligence of his return, and calling for a proper
equipage to meet him at the railroad end, he had chosen to come back
in this secret and unexpected way.

That was true to the colonel's manner. Perhaps he hoped to catch
somebody overstepping the line of decorum, regulations, forms, either
in the conduct of the post's business or his own household. For the
colonel was as much a tyrant in one place as the other. So he
eliminated himself, wrapped to the bushy eyebrows in his greatcoat,
for there was a chilliness in the afternoon, and clouds were driving
over the sun.

His austerity silenced the talkative driver, and when the stage
reached the hotel the colonel parted from him without a word and
clicked away briskly on his military heels--built up to give him
stature--to see w