s a comfort to both when Sam came tooling
the stylish turnout through the sally-port and his battery chums caught
sight of the Allertons. Pierce was just returning from stables, and
Ferry was smoking a pipe of _perique_ on the broad gallery, and both
hastened to don their best jackets and doff their best caps to these
interesting and interested callers. Cram himself had gone off for a ride
and a think. He always declared his ideas were clearer after a gallop.
The band played charmingly. The ladies came out and made a picturesque
croquet-party on the green carpet of the parade. The officers clustered
about and offered laughing wagers on the game. A dozen romping children
were playing joyously around the tall flag-staff. The air was rich with
the fragrance of the magnolia and Cape jasmine, and glad with music and
soft and merry voices. Then the stirring bugles rang out their lively
summons to the batterymen beyond the wall. The drums of the infantry
rolled and rattled their echoing clamor. The guard sprang into ranks,
and their muskets, glistening in the slanting beams of the setting sun,
clashed in simultaneous "present" to the red-sashed officer of the day,
and that official raised his plumed hat to the lieutenant with the
lovely girl by his side and the smiling elders on the back seat as the
team once more made the circuit of the post on the back trip to town,
and Miss Flora Allerton clasped her hands and looked enthusiastically up
into her escort's face.

"Oh," she cried, "isn't it all just too lovely for anything! Why, I
think your life here must be like a dream."

But Miss Allerton, as Mrs. Cram had said, sometimes gushed, and life at
Jackson Barracks was no such dream as it appeared.

The sun went down red and angry far across the tawny flood of the
rushing river. The night lights were set at the distant bend below. The
stars came peeping through a shifting filmy veil. The big trees on the
levee and about the flanking towers began to whisper and complain and
creak, and the rising wind sent long wisps of straggly cloud racing
across the sky. The moon rose pallid and wan, hung for a while over the
dense black mass of moss-grown cypress in the eastward swamp, then hid
her face behind a heavy bank of clouds, as though reluctant to look upon
the wrath to come, for a storm was rising fast and furious to break upon
and deluge old Jackson Barracks.

CHAPTER IV.

When Jeffers came driving into barracks on his r