n Chester, all alone, had laboriously and
cautiously dragged the ladder from the side to the rear of the colonel's
house, stretched it in the roadway where he had first stumbled upon it,
then returned to the searching-party on "Number Five."

"Send two men to put that ladder back," he ordered. "It is where I told
you,--on the road behind the colonel's."

III.

When Mrs. Maynard came to Sibley in May and the officers with their
wives were making their welcoming call, she had with motherly pride and
pleasure yielded to their constant importunities and shown to one party
after another an album of photographs,--likenesses of her only daughter.
There were little _cartes de visite_ representing her in long dresses
and baby-caps; quaint little pictures of a chubby-faced, chubby-legged
infant a few months older; charming studies of a little girl with great
black eyes and delicate features; then of a tall, slender slip of a
maiden, decidedly foreign-looking; then of a sweet and pensive face,
with great dark eyes, long, beautiful curling lashes, and very heavy,
low-arched brows, exquisitely moulded mouth and chin, and most luxuriant
dark hair; then others, still older, in every variety of dress,--even in
fancy costume, such as the girl had worn at fair or masquerade. These
and others still had Mrs. Maynard shown them, with repressed pride and
pleasure and with sweet acknowledgment of their enthusiastic praises.
Alice still tarried in the East, visiting relatives whom she had not
seen since her father's death three years earlier, and, long before she
came to join her mother at Sibley and to enter upon the life she so
eagerly looked forward to, "'way out in the West, you know, with
officers and soldiers and the band, and buffalo and Indians all around
you," there was not an officer or an officer's wife who had not
delightedly examined that album. There was still another picture, but
that one had been shown to only a chosen few just one week after her
daughter's arrival, and rather an absurd scene had occurred, in which
that most estimable officer, Lieutenant Sloat, had figured as the hero.
A more simple-minded, well-intentioned fellow than Sloat there did not
live. He was so full of kindness and good nature and readiness to do
anything for anybody that it never seemed to occur to him that everybody
on earth was not just as ready to be equally accommodating. He was a
perpetual source of delight to the colonel, and one of t