officers who forbade their
senseless slaughter to make food only for the worthless, prowling
coyotes. No wonder the trooper hated to leave the foothills of the
mountains, with the cold, clear trout streams and the bracing air, to
take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie,
covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless,
springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull
pools of stagnant water still held out against the sun, or, further
still southeast among the "breaks" of the many forks of the South
Cheyenne, on the sandy flats men dug for water for their suffering
horses, yet shrank from drinking it themselves lest their lips should
crack and bleed through the shriveling touch of the alkali.

Barely two years a commissioned officer, the young lieutenant at the
head of column rode buoyantly along, caring little for the landscape,
since with every traversed mile he found himself just that much nearer
home. Twenty-five summers, counting this one coming, had rolled over his
curly head, and each one had seemed brighter, happier than the last, all
but the one he spent as a hard-worked "plebe" at the military academy.
His graduation summer two years previous was a glory to him, as well as
to a pretty sister, young and enthusiastic enough to think a brother in
the regulars, just out of West Point, something to be made much of, and
Jessie Dean had lost no opportunity of spoiling her soldier or of
wearying her school friends through telling of his manifold perfections.
He was a manly, stalwart, handsome fellow as young graduates go, and old
ones wish they might go over again. He was a fond and not too teasing
kind of brother. He wasn't the brightest fellow in the class by thirty
odd, and had barely scraped through one or two of his examinations, but
Jessie proudly pointed to the fact that much more than half the class
had "scraped off" entirely, and therefore that those who succeeded in
getting through at all were paragons, especially Brother Marshall. But
girls at that school had brothers of their own, girls who had never seen
West Point or had the cadet fever, and were not impressed with young
officers as painted by so indulgent a sister. Most of the girls had
tired of Jessie's talks, and some had told her so, but there was one who
had been sympathetic from the start--a far Western, friendless sort of
girl she was when first she entered school, uncouthly dressed,