d her way.

Once, Sergeant Fones, on leaving the house, said grimly after his
fashion: "Not Mab but Ariadne--excuse a soldier's bluntness.....
Good-bye!" and with a brusque salute he had ridden away. What he meant
she did not know and could not ask. The thought instantly came to her
mind: Not Sergeant Fones; but who? She wondered if Ariadne was born on
the prairie. What knew she of the girl who helped Theseus, her lover, to
slay the Minotaur? What guessed she of the Slopes of Naxos? How old was
Ariadne? Twenty? For that was Mab's age. Was Ariadne beautiful? She ran
her fingers loosely through her short brown hair, waving softly
about her Greek-shaped head, and reasoned that Ariadne must have been
presentable, or Sergeant Fones would not have made the comparison. She
hoped Ariadne could ride well, for she could.

But how white the world looked this morning, and how proud and brilliant
the sky! Nothing in the plane of vision but waves of snow stretching to
the Cypress Hills; far to the left a solitary house, with its tin
roof flashing back the sun, and to the right the Big Divide. It was an
old-fashioned winter, not one in which bare ground and sharp winds make
life outdoors inhospitable. Snow is hospitable-clean, impacted snow;
restful and silent. But there was one spot in the area of white, on
which Mab's eyes were fixed now, with something different in them from
what had been there. Again it was a memory with which Sergeant Fones was
associated. One day in the summer just past she had watched him and his
company put away to rest under the cool sod, where many another lay in
silent company, a prairie wanderer, some outcast from a better life gone
by. Afterwards, in her home, she saw the Sergeant stand at the window,
looking out towards the spot where the waves in the sea of grass were
more regular and greener than elsewhere, and were surmounted by a high
cross. She said to him--for she of all was never shy of his stern ways:

"Why is the grass always greenest there, Sergeant Fones?"

He knew what she meant, and slowly said: "It is the Barracks of the
Free."

She had no views of life save those of duty and work and natural joy and
loving a ne'er-do-weel, and she said: "I do not understand that."

And the Sergeant replied: "'Free among the Dead like unto them that are
wounded and lie in the grave, who are out of remembrance.'"

But Mab said again: "I do not understand that either."

The Sergeant did not at once re