ft by a senior in command--the gap through which poured the
impetuous gray torrent of the Southland--and for the third time
everything crumbled away in spite of him, while he was left for dead
upon the field. He had done his best, as had other men, and had fared
only the worst. It was a case of three times and out. The impatient
North had no more use for names linked only with disaster. When,
finally exchanged, he limped back to duty, they put him on courts,
boards and other back-door business until the war was over, then sent
him to the Pacific Slope, with the blanket brevet of March, 1865, and
here he was, eight long years thereafter, "The General" by way of
title, without the command; silver leaves where once gleamed the stars
on his shoulders; silver streaks where once rippled chestnut and gold;
wrinkled of visage and withered in shank; kindly, patient, yet
pathetic; "functioning" a four-company post in a far-away desert, with
grim mountain chains on east and west, and waters on every side of
him, four long weeks and four thousand miles by mail route from home,
and much longer by sea; with nothing to do but send out scouts, sign
papers, sing an old song or two when the spirit moved him; with not a
thing in his soldier past to be ashamed of, nothing much in his soldier
present to rejoice in, nothing whatever in his soldier future to hope
for, finding his companionship in the comrades about him, and his
sweetest comfort in the unswerving love of a devoted wife, and their
one unstinted pride and delight, Lilian, their only daughter--their
only surviving child.

Many of these eight years of what then was exile, while he, at first as
a major of foot, was campaigning in regions long since reclaimed from
savagery, and rusticating at frontier forts long since forgotten,
Lilian and her mother had dwelt in lodgings at "The Bay" that the child
might have the advantage of San Francisco's schools. Only once each
year, until of late, had he been able to visit them, usually at
Christmas-tide, but by every runner, courier, stage or post there came
to them his cheery letters, bearing such old-time, outlandish
post-marks or headings as "Lapwai," "Three Forks, Owyhee," and later
"Hualpai," or "Hassayampa," until finally it became mild, civilized,
pacific, even "Almy."

The uniform of a general, that the law had let him wear just as long in
peace as had been the war in years, was finally packed in camphorated
hope of resurrection, an