s, who evidently faced
a situation grievous enough in itself without these auxiliary troubles.
Certain turbulent spirits opined loudly that they, the humbler people,
had advantage taken of them,--that the officers' mess was served in a
profusion never abated, while the rest starved. Captain Stuart and
Captain Demere would not notice this report, but the junior officers
were vehement in their protestations that they and their superiors had
had from the beginning of the scarcity the identical rations served out
to the others, and that their gluttony had not reduced the general
supply. The quartermaster-sergeant confirmed this, yet who believed him,
as Mrs. Halsing said, for he carried the keys and could favor whom he
would. That he did not favor himself was obvious from the fact that his
once red face had grown an ashen gray, and the cheeks hung in visible
cords and ligaments under the thrice-folded skin, the flesh between
having gradually vanished. The African cook felt his honor so touched by
this aspersion on his master's methods that he carried his kettles and
pans out into the center of the parade one day and there, in
insubordinate disregard of orders, cooked in public the scanty materials
of the officers' dinner. And having thus expressed his indignant rage he
sat down on the ground among his kettles and pans and wept aloud in a
long lugubrious howl, thus giving vent to his grief, and requiring the
kind offices of every friend he had in the fort to pacify him and induce
him to remove himself, his pans, and his kettles from this unseemly
conspicuousness.

At the height of the trouble, when Stuart and Demere, themselves anxious
and nervous, and greatly reduced by the poor quality and scarcity of
food, sat together and speculated on the problem of Montgomery's
silence, and the continued absence of the express, and wondered how long
this state of things could be maintained, yearning for, yet fearing the
end,--talking as they dared not talk to any human being but each to the
other,--Ensign Whitson burst into the room with an excited face and the
news that there had been a fight over in the northeast bastion at the
further side of the terrepleine.

Captain Stuart rose, bracing his nerves for the endurance of still more.

"A food riot? I have expected it. Have they broken into the
smoke-house?"

Whitson looked wild for one moment. "Oh, no, sir,--not that!--not that!
Two Irishmen at fisticuffs,--about the Battle of the