, the densely wooded
character of the tangled wilderness affording peculiar advantage to the
skulking individual methods of the savage and embarrassing inconceivably
the more cumbrous evolutions of organized bodies. But long before
Captain Demere's time, and often since, the futility of opposing regular
scientific tactics to the alert wiles of the savage native in his own
difficult country has been commented upon by observers of military
methods, and doubtless recognized in the hard knocks of experience by
those whose fate it has been to try again the experiment.[6]

"As to military ethics," he added, "to induce the Indian to accept and
abide by the principles governing civilized warfare seems an
impossibility. He cannot be constrained for a pledge of honor to forego
an advantage. He will not respect his parole. He continually violates
and sets at naught the provisions of his solemn treaty."

Odalie would not ask if the white man never broke faith with the red--if
the Indian had not been taught by example near at hand of what brittle
stuff a treaty was made. It was not worth while to reason logically with
a mere man, she said to herself, with a little secret sentiment of
derision, which served to lighten a trifle the gloom of her mental
atmosphere, and since she could not eat and little backwoods Fifine's
eyes had absorbed her appetite, it was just as well that Hamish, who had
been greatly interested in being shown over the fort by the jolly
Corporal O'Flynn, appeared at the door with the intelligence that their
quarters were assigned them. The courteous Captain Demere handed her to
the door, and she stepped out from the bizarre decorated mess-hall into
the dark night, with the stars showing a chill scintillation as of the
approach of winter in their white glitter high in the sky, and the
looming bastion close at hand. The barracks were silent; "tattoo" had
just sounded; the great gates were closed, and the high walls shut off
the world from the deserted parade.

Naught was audible in all the night save the measured tread of a sentry
walking his beat, and further away, seeming an echo, the step of
another sentinel, while out in the wilderness the scream of a wildcat
came shrilly on the wind from the darkness where Alexander roamed with
savage beasts and still more savage men far from the sweet security so
trebly protected here.

Not even the flare of another big homelike fire in the cabin assigned to
her could effac