rt stop.

"Oh, you--" he exclaimed, in the tone of making an exception, "you are
you."

He felt equal to any arrangements for merely military mortals, but the
"squaw question," as he mentally called it, overwhelmed him. With a lot
of anxious, troubled, houseless women and querulous, distraught,
frightened children, and difficult half-grown boys,--and the
commandant's general orders to quarter them all to their satisfaction
and to furnish whatever was necessary,--the strain might have proved too
great for the old bustling sergeant, and like undue pressure on the
boiler of one of our modern locomotives, which he much resembled, as he
went back and forth puffingly, might have exploded his valuable
faculties, but for Odalie's well-meant hints.

"I should give Mrs. Halsing the larger room if I were you," she
suggested. "Mrs. Beedie is a friend of mine and I will answer for it
that she won't mind." Or--"If I might suggest, I wouldn't put Mrs. Dean
and the twin babies next to Mrs. Rush. Nervous headaches and other
people's twin babies won't keep step--not one bit. Put them next to me.
I am conveniently deaf at times."

And Mrs. Halsing said, "That French thing flirts with every man in the
fort, from the commandant down to Mrs. Dean's one-year-old boy twin!"
For Odalie was presently conveying this juvenile personage about in her
arms, and he left off a whimper, characteristic of no particular age or
sex, to exhibit a truly masculine interest in the big soldiers with
their bright uniforms and clanking accouterments, and although
constrained by the force of the concussion to blink and close his eyes
whenever the great guns were fired, he fairly wheezed and squealed with
manly ecstasy in the sound--for a cannonade had begun, seeking to deter
the plunder of the deserted houses in the settlement.

The din suddenly ceased; the active military figures paused in the swift
preparations that were in progress to meet the expected attack; the
confusion and stir of the groups of settlers' families in the parade
were petrified in a sort of aghast disarray; amongst them appeared half
a dozen stalwart fellows bearing a stretcher, on which lay the body of
the dead soldier whom the horse had brought into the fort, his young
boyish face all smooth again and serenely upturned to the serene sky. He
was dressed in his uniform, with his belt and gloves freshly pipeclayed
and glittering white. His melancholy progress from the crowded barracks
to