r was more than enough to banish every thought
of self or suffering and to fill her fond heart with instant and
loving care for him. No one, not even Janet, was present during the
interview between father and child that followed. Graham found him
later locked in his own room, reluctant to admit even him, and
lingering long before he opened the door; but even then the
tear-stains stood on his furrowed face, and the doctor knew he had
been sobbing his great heart out over the picture of his child--the
child he had so harshly judged and sentenced, all unheard. Graham had
gone to him, after seeing Angela, with censure on his tongue, but he
never spoke the words. He saw there was no longer need.

"Let the lassie lie still the day," said he, "with Kate, perhaps, to
read to her. Your sister might not choose a cheering book. Then
perhaps we'll have her riding Punch again to-morrow." But Graham did
not smile when meeting Janet by the parlor door.

He was thinking of the contrast in these two, his patients, as with
professional calm he studied the troubled features of the major's wife
when the voice of Sergeant Shannon was heard in the lower hall,
inquiring for the major, and in an instant Plume had joined him. In
that instant, too, Elise had sped, cat-like, to the door, and Mrs.
Plume had followed. Possibly for this reason the major led the
sergeant forth upon the piazza and the conversation took place in
tones inaudible to those within the house; but, in less than a minute,
the doctor's name was called and Graham went down.

"Look at this," said Plume. "They raked it out of the sand close to
where Mullins was lying." And the major held forth an object that
gleamed in the last rays of the slanting sunshine. It was Blakely's
beautiful watch.

CHAPTER VII

"WOMAN-WALK-IN-THE-NIGHT"

The dawn of another cloudless day was breaking and the dim lights at
the guard-house and the hospital burned red and bleary across the
sandy level of the parade. The company cooks were already at their
ranges, and a musician of the guard had been sent to rouse his fellows
in the barracks, for the old-style reveille still held good at many a
post in Arizona, before the drum and fife were almost entirely
abandoned in favor of the harsher bugle, by the infantry of our
scattered little army. Plume loved tradition. At West Point, where he
had often visited in younger days, and at all the "old-time"
garrisons, the bang of the morning gun and