, and Willett, unhappily, upon his mettle.

A silence fell upon the party when it was found Harris was gone. 'Tonio
himself had risen again, had stood gazing awhile along the eastward
mountains, tumbling up toward a brazen sky, then had slowly vanished
from sight round the corner of the adobe wall.

"Sticks closer'n a brother," said Stannard, epigrammatically, with a
look at Turner, his comrade captain, whereat the latter shot a warning
glance, first at Stannard, then toward the unconscious N.A., now
hobnobbing with Briggs at the mess-room door.

"Harris doesn't like the young swell! What's the matter, d'ye s'pose?"
asked Bucketts, the post quartermaster, a man of much weight, but not
too much discrimination.

"Bosh! They're classmates and old chums," was Stannard's quick reply.
"Harris is hipped because his scout was a fizzle, and he simply doesn't
feel like talking."

"All the same, he doesn't like Willett, classmate or no classmate. You
mark my words," persisted the man of mops and brooms, and Stannard, who
had seen the youngster's face as he turned away, knew well the
quartermaster was right. Therefore was it his duty, for the sake of the
regiment, said he, to stand by Harris as hailing from the cavalry. He
scoffed at the quartermaster and began to pace the veranda. 'Twas high
time for evening stables, and the brief and perfunctory grooming the
short-coupled, stocky little mountain climbers daily received. The
herds had been driven in, watering in the shallows as they forded the
stream full fifteen minutes before. There were only the surgeon, the
adjutant, the quartermaster, and Lieutenant Willett seated on the
veranda when Harris presently came back, silent as before, but clad in
undress uniform, as neat and trim as that of the Latest Arrival, if not
so new. Then came General Archer, his daughter, and the meeting. Then,
a few minutes later, the bid to dinner, and then, barely an hour from
that time, the dinner itself--a function the classmates marched to
almost arm in arm when either would rather have been without the other.

The members of what there was of the mess, six officers in all, sat
waiting the summons to their own board, and gazing idly after. Stannard,
the only married captain whose wife had had the nerve to go to that
desolate and distant station, was sitting under his own figurative vine
and fig-tree represented by a pine veranda, about which neither vine
nor fig nor other tree had ever been ind