and southwest fronts. The enlisted men going to or from
town passed across the big, high bridge or went at once to their own
quarters on the east and north. This southwestern terrace behind the
bachelors' row was the most secluded spot on the whole post,--so much so
that when a fire broke out there among the fuel-heaps one sharp winter's
night a year agone it had wellnigh enveloped the whole line before its
existence was discovered. Indeed, not until after this occurrence was a
sentry posted on that front at all; and, once ordered there, he had so
little to do and was so comparatively sure to be undisturbed that the
old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and
were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief
tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent
as an empty church; but this night "Number Five" leaped suddenly into
notoriety.

Instead of going home, Chester kept on across the plateau and took a
long walk on the northern side of the reservation, where the
quarter-master's stables and corrals were placed. He was affected by a
strange unrest. His talk with Rollins had roused the memories of years
long gone by,--of days when he, too, was young and full of hope and
faith, ay, full of love,--all lavished on one fair girl who knew it
well, but gently, almost entreatingly, repelled him. Her heart was
wrapped up in another, the Adonis of his day in the gay old seaboard
garrison. She was a soldier's child, barrack-born, simply taught,
knowing little of the vice and temptations, the follies and the frauds,
of the whirling life of civilization. A good and gentle mother had
reared her and been called hence. Her father, an officer whose sabre-arm
was left at Molino del Rey, and whose heart was crushed when the loving
wife was taken from him, turned to the child who so resembled her, and
centred there all his remaining love and life. He welcomed Chester to
his home, and tacitly favored his suit, but in his blindness never saw
how a few moonlit strolls on the old moss-grown parapet, a few evening
dances in the casemates with handsome, wooing, winning Will Forrester,
had done their work. She gave him all the wild, enthusiastic,
worshipping love of her girlish heart just about the time Captain and
Mrs. Maynard came back from leave, and then he grew cold and negligent
_there_, but lived at Maynard's fireside; and one day there came a
sensation,--a tragedy,--and