lush! Captain Cram looked suspiciously at the earnest,
unwinking, black face before him. Some memory of old college days
flitted through his mind at the moment. "O Kunopes!" ("thou dog-faced
one!") he caught himself muttering, but negro diplomacy was too much for
him, and the innocence in the face of Ananias would have baffled a man
far more suspicious. Cram was a fellow who loved his battery and his
profession as few men loved before. He was full of big ideas in one way
and little oddities in another. Undoubted ability had been at the bottom
of his selection over the head of many a senior to command one of the
light batteries when the general dismounting took place in '66. Unusual
attractions of person had won him a wife with a fortune only a little
later. The fortune had warranted a short leave abroad this very year.
(He would not have taken a day over sixty, for fear of losing his light
battery.) He had been a stickler for gauntlets on all mounted duty when
he went away, and he came home converted to white wash-leather gloves
because the British horse-artillery wore no other, "and they, sir, are
the nattiest in the world." He could not tolerate an officer whose soul
was not aflame with enthusiasm for battery duty, and so was perpetually
at war with Waring, who dared to have other aspirations. He delighted in
a man who took pride in his dress and equipment, and so rejoiced in
Waring, who, more than any subaltern ever attached to "X," was the very
glass of soldier fashion and mould of soldier form. He had dropped in at
the bachelor mess just in time to hear some gabbling youngster blurt
out a bet that Sam Waring would cut review and keep his tryst in town,
and he had known him many a time to overpersuade his superiors into
excusing him from duty on pretext of social claims, and more than once
into pardoning deliberate absence. But he and the post commander had
deemed it high time to block all that nonsense in future, and had so
informed him, and were nonplussed at Waring's cheery acceptance of the
implied rebuke and most airy, graceful, and immediate change of the
subject. The whole garrison was chuckling over it by night.

"Why, certainly, colonel," said he, "I _have_ been most derelict of late
during the visit of all these charming people from the North; and that
reminds me, some of them are going to drive out here to hear the band
this afternoon and take a bite at my quarters. I was just on my way to
beg Mrs. Braxton