CHAPTER II.

GARRISON TALK.

It was a picturesque group that assembled every pleasant morning on the
veranda of the colonel's quarters. There had been a time in the not very
distant past of the regiment when the ladies gathered almost anywhere
else in preference, but that was when Colonel Pelham had retained the
command, and when his wife sought to rule the garrison after methods of
her own devising. However successful may be such feminine usurpation for
a time, it is at best but a temporary power, for women are of all things
revolutionary. The instances where some ambitious matron has sought to
assume the control of the little military bailiwick known as "the
garrison" are numerous indeed, but the fingers of one hand are too many
to keep tally of the cases of prolonged and peaceful reign. Mrs.
Pelham's queendom had been limited to a very brief fortnight,--so 'twas
said in the regiment,--despite the fact that the more prominent members
of the social circle of the --th had been quite ready to do her every
homage on her first arrival,--provided the prime ministry were not given
to some rival sister. But Mrs. Pelham's administration had been fraught
with errors and disasters enough to wreck a constitutional monarchy,
and, as a result, affairs were in a highly socialistic, if not
nihilistic condition for some months after the return of the regiment
from its exile in Arizona. Only a few of the officers had taken their
families thither with them, for the journey in those days was full of
vast discomfort and expense, and life there was an isolation; but those
ladies who had shared the heat and burden of the Arizona days with their
lords were not unnaturally given to regarding themselves as entitled to
more consideration as regimental authorities than those of their
sisterhood who had remained in comfort in the East. Then, too, there was
a little band of heroines who had made the march "cross country" with
the --th, and held themselves (and were held by the men) as having a
higher place on the regimental unwritten records than those who were
sent home by way of the Pacific, San Francisco, and the one railway that
then belted the continent. Of these heroines Mrs. Pelham was not, and
when she rejoined at Fort Hays, got her house in order and proceeded,
though with inward misgiving, to summon her subjects about her, she
found that even the faint rally on which she had counted was denied her.
The ladies who knew her at Camp