dquarters was
flapping in the wet wind.

The rain ended as she rode inland; ahead of her a double rainbow glowed
and slowly faded to a rosy nimbus.

Corps headquarters was heavily impressive and paternally polite,
referring her to headquarters of the unattached cavalry division.

She remounted, setting her horse at an easy canter for the intervening
two miles, riding through acres of tents and vistas of loaded wagon
trains; and at last an exceedingly ornamental staff officer directed her
to her destination, and a few moments later she dismounted and handed
her bridle to an orderly, whose curiously fashioned forage cap seemed
strangely familiar.

As the Special Messenger entered his tent and saluted, the colonel of
the Fourth Missouri Cavalry rose from a camp chair, standing over six
feet in his boots. He was magnificently built; his closely clipped hair
was dark and curly, his skin smoothly bronzed and flushed at the cheek
bones; his allure that of a very splendid and grave and youthful god,
save for the gayly impudent uptwist of his short mustache and the
stilled humor in his steady eyes.

His uniform was entirely different from the regulation--he wore a blue
forage cap with short, heavy visor of unpolished leather shadowing the
bridge of his nose; his dark blue jacket was shell-cut; over it he wore
a slashed dolman trimmed at throat, wrists and edges with fur; his
breeches were buff; his boots finished at the top with a yellow cord
forming a heart-shaped knot in front; at his heels trailed the most
dainty and rakish of sabres, light, graceful, curved almost like a
scimiter.

All this is what the Special Messenger saw as she entered, instantly
recognizing a regimental uniform which she had never seen but once
before in her brief life. And straight through her heart struck a pain
swift as a dagger thrust, and her hand in its buckskin gauntlet fell
limply from the peak of her visor, and the color died in her cheeks.

What the colonel of the Fourth Missouri saw before him was a lad, slim,
rather pale, dark-eyed, swathed to the chin in the folds of a wet
poncho; and he said, examining her musingly and stroking the ends of his
curt mustache upward:

"I understood from General Sheridan that the Special Messenger was to
report to me. Where is she?"

The lightning pain of the shock when she recognized the uniform
interfered with breath and speech; confused, she raised her gloved hand
and laid it unconsciously over