as
ever, for, reform having started at Silver Hill, the gamblers and
harpies being kicked from its corporate limits, these philosophers,--the
flotsam and jetsam of the frontier,--lost little cash and less time
before settling again, and in greater numbers, on the skirts of Uncle
Sam.

And then it was that, after a year or two of turmoil and trouble, "in
our day there lived a man" who solved the problem, dealt rum, the flesh
and the devil the worst blow known to the combination, and started under
the auspices of the post Exchange the common sense and only successful
system ever tried in the army, known to the Press and its civilian
readers by the name of the Canteen.

And then again after a few years of peace, prosperity and contentment,
good order and discipline, after the man whose monument is inscribed
"The Soldier's Friend," his good work finished, was gathered to his
fathers, the resultant years of thought and experiment were overthrown
in a day. A congress of women over-mastered a congress of men. Exit the
Canteen: Re-enter the grog shop, the hell and the hog ranch. Burned out
at the borders of Silver Hill, the way blazed for him and his vile
retinue of swindlers and strumpets by the best intentions that ever
paved the streets of sheol, back to the gates of Fort Minneconjou came
the saloon and its concomitants--and the day of order and discipline was
done.

"I wouldn't say a word against it," protested Colonel Stone to the
grave-faced Inspector sent out from St. Paul to investigate the first
killing, "if, when they shut up _our_ shop they had shut up _those_!"
and with clinching fist he struck savagely at empty space and the
swarming row of ramshackle tenements beyond the stream. "Of what earthly
good was it to anybody, I ask you,--except the distiller and dealer in
liquors,--to close our guarded, homelike tables and reopen that
unlimited unlicensed hell?"

A new road to Silver Hill, albeit roundabout, had become a necessity.
The old well-worn beeline through by way of the ford had become
impracticable for women and children and self-respecting people in
general. It was skirted for some two hundred yards by tenements and
tenants not easily described in these pages. The colonel had been jeered
at by painted sirens at upper windows. Priscilla Sanford, starting one
morning to town, turned crimson at the shrill acclaim of the scarlet
sisterhood, two of whom had kissed their hands to her. Stone, when he
heard of i