tterly spurred ahead.

He was not the first man in the profession of arms to realize what it
is to faithfully and persistently labor to develop, instruct and
discipline a body of men until he and they are working in absolute
accord, all the intricate parts of the human machine nicely adjusted
and moving without the faintest friction, and then to find himself at
the eleventh hour set to one side, a stranger to his men and a rival to
himself set in his stead, and be bidden to move on as a sort of martial
second fiddle, while the credit and reward go to the new first violin.
Nor was Harris the last by any manner of means. As General Archer had
himself been heard to say, "One essential of military preferment is a
knowledge of the game of euchre--your neighbor." Couple this with utter
indifference to the rights of fellow-soldiers, and a catlike capacity
to work by stealth in the dark, and there is no starry altitude to
which one may not aspire. Harris made the same mistake older soldiers
had sometimes made in higher commands, that of sticking to their own
men, and duties, without keeping an eye on, and a friend at,
headquarters. Anomalous as it may sound, the absent are ever wrong,
even when "present for duty," where they should be. If Harris that
night had only gone to headquarters instead of his camp; had stopped to
see the general instead of starting promptly to the rescue, there would
have been less to tell by way of a story.

Possibly a realization of this had already come over him, as angering
yet unswerving, he once again overtook the eager leaders among his
scouts,--lean, wiry fellows, ever gliding swiftly on in that tireless
Apache running walk. Once there again, he kept his broncho at the trot
to hold his own, and a broncho trot, after a mile or two of warming up,
becomes something besides monotonous. Away to the far front, the
north-east, flickered the tiny blazes; guiding lights, as Willett would
have it; bale fires, as Harris began to believe--fires set by
confederates to blind the eye of the pursuit, or lure pursuers to a
trap. Away to the far front, seven miles now, and deep in a nook of the
foothills, lay the site of Bennett's ruined ranch, and thither, at top
speed of his scouts, was the young leader pressing. Not even a dull
glow in the heavens above, or a spark on the earth beneath, could the
sharp-eyed scouts discover to tell of its lonely fate. Only the dago's
horrified words, only the confirmative symp