--or I--Well, there's a
bet, and we shook hands on it."

"Seems to me that's pretty serious business, Sloat,--a bet following
such a talk as you two have had. I hope--"

"Well, captain," interrupted Sloat, "I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't
been mad as blazes; but I made it, and must stick to it,--that's all."

"You wouldn't mind telling me what it was, I suppose?"

"I can't; and that ends it."

Captain Chester found food for much thought and speculation over this
incident. So far as he was concerned, the abrupt remark of Sloat by no
means ended it. In his distrust of Jerrold, he too had taken alarm at
the very substantial intimacy to which that young man was welcomed at
the colonel's quarters. Prior to his marriage old Maynard had not liked
him at all, but it was mainly because he had been so negligent of his
duties and so determined a beau in city society after his arrival at
Sibley. He had, indeed, threatened to have him transferred to a company
still on frontier service if he did not reform; but then the
rifle-practice season began, and Jerrold was a capital shot and sure to
be on the list of competitors for the Department team, so what was the
use? He would be ordered in for the rifle-camp anyway, and so the
colonel decided to keep him at head-quarters. This was in the summer of
the year gone by. Then came the colonel's long leave, his visit to
Europe, his meeting with his old friend, now the widow of the lamented
Renwick, their delightful winter together in Italy, his courtship, her
consent, their marriage and return to America. When Maynard came back to
Sibley and the old regiment, he was so jolly and content that every man
was welcomed at his house, and it was really a source of pride and
pleasure to him that his accomplished wife should find any of his young
officers so thoroughly agreeable as she pronounced Mr. Jerrold. Others
were soldierly, courteous, well bred, but he had the air of a foreign
court about him, she privately informed her lord; and it seems, indeed,
that in days gone by Mr. Jerrold's father had spent many years in France
and Spain, once as his country's representative near the throne. Though
the father died long before the boy was out of his knickerbockers, he
had left the impress of his grand manner, and Jerrold, to women of any
age, was at once a courtier and a knight. But the colonel never saw how
her eyes followed the tall young officer time and again. There were
women who soon note