t photo? What had he done with it? For the first time in four
days he remembered his picking it up when Mrs. Hal Folsom collapsed at
sight of Jake's swooning. Down in the depths of the side pocket of his
heavy blue flannel hunting shirt he found it, crumpled a bit, and all
its lower left-hand corner bent and blackened and crushed, Chaska's last
shot that tore its way so close below the young soldier's bounding
heart, just nipping and searing the skin, had left its worst mark on
that dainty _carte de visite_. In that same pocket, too, was another
packet--a letter which had been picked up on the floor of the hut at
Reno after Burleigh left--one for which the major had searched in vain,
for it was underneath a lot of newspapers. "You take that after him,"
said the cantonment commander, as Dean followed with the troop next day,
and little dreamed what it contained.

That very day, in the heavy, old-fashioned sleeping-cars of the Union
Pacific, two young girls were seated in their section on the northward
side. One, a dark-eyed, radiant beauty, gazed out over the desolate
slopes and far-reaching stretches of prairie and distant lines of bald
bluff, with delight in her dancing eyes. The other, a winsome maid of
nineteen, looked on with mild wonderment, not unmixed with
disappointment she would gladly have hidden. To Elinor the scenes of her
childhood were dear and welcome; to Jessie there was too much that was
somber, too little that was inviting. But presently, as the long train
rolled slowly to the platform of a rude wooden station building, there
came a sight at which the eyes of both girls danced in eager interest--a
row of "A" tents on the open prairie, a long line of horses tethered to
the picket ropes, groups of stalwart, sunburned men in rough blue garb,
a silken guidon flapping by the tents of the officers. It was one of
half a dozen such camps of detached troops they had been passing ever
since breakfast time--the camps of isolated little commands guarding the
new railway on the climb to Cheyenne. Papa, with one or two cronies, was
playing "old sledge" in the smoking compartment. At a big station a few
miles back two men in the uniform of officers boarded the car, one of
them burly, rotund, and sallow. He was shown to the section just in
front of the girls, and at Pappoose he stared--stared long and hard, so
that she bit her lip and turned nervously away. The porter dusted the
seat and disposed of the hand luggage an