t lover. I ask you to salute that young man as I
do, and to wish him well." Clay lifted his high hat to the back of the
young officer as it was hidden in the hanging vines, and once again,
with grave respect to the grim features of the great general above him,
and then smiling at his own conceit, he ran lightly down the steps and
disappeared among the trees of the plaza.

IX

Clay slept for three hours. He had left a note on the floor
instructing MacWilliams and young Langham not to go to the mines, but
to waken him at ten o'clock, and by eleven the three men were galloping
off to the city. As they left the Palms they met Hope returning from a
morning ride on the Alameda, and Clay begged her, with much concern,
not to ride abroad again. There was a difference in his tone toward
her. There was more anxiety in it than the occasion seemed to justify,
and he put his request in the form of a favor to himself, while the day
previous he would simply have told her that she must not go riding
alone.

"Why?" asked Hope, eagerly. "Is there going to be trouble?"

"I hope not," Clay said, "but the soldiers are coming in from the
provinces for the review, and the roads are not safe."

"I'd be safe with you, though," said Hope, smiling persuasively upon
the three men. "Won't you take me with you, please?"

"Hope," said young Langham in the tone of the elder brother's brief
authority, "you must go home at once."

Hope smiled wickedly. "I don't want to," she said.

"I'll bet you a box of cigars I can beat you to the veranda by fifty
yards," said MacWilliams, turning his horse's head.

Hope clasped her sailor hat in one hand and swung her whip with the
other. "I think not," she cried, and disappeared with a flutter of
skirts and a scurry of flying pebbles.

"At times," said Clay, "MacWilliams shows an unexpected knowledge of
human nature."

"Yes, he did quite right," assented Langham, nodding his head
mysteriously. "We've no time for girls at present, have we?"

"No, indeed," said Clay, hiding any sign of a smile.

Langham breathed deeply at the thought of the part he was to play in
this coming struggle, and remained respectfully silent as they trotted
toward the city. He did not wish to disturb the plots and counterplots
that he was confident were forming in Clay's brain, and his devotion
would have been severely tried had he known that his hero's mind was
filled with a picture of a young girl in a blue s