ected to stay here all his life. Do you not
know, Bert, that we are only here for a little while--a year or two?
Before you are eighteen months older very likely you will find yourself
out on the plains. What a life it is!"

The fort ladies all sighed. It was a habit they had. They drew the
dreariest pictures of their surroundings and privations in their letters
homeward, and really believed them, theoretically. In truth, there were
some privations; but would any one of them have exchanged army life for
civilian? To the last, thorough army ladies retain their ways; you
recognize them even when retired to private and perhaps more prosperous
life. Cosmopolitans, they do not sink into the ruts of small-town life;
they are never provincial. They take the world easily, having a
pleasant, generous taste for its pleasures, and making light of the
burdens that fall to their share. All little local rules and ways are
nothing to them: neither here nor anywhere are they to remain long. With
this habit and manner they keep up a vast amount of general
cheeriness--vast indeed, when one considers how small the incomes
sometimes are. But if small, they are also sure.

"Rast Pronando is too old for such frolics, I think," said Mrs. Rankin,
the lieutenant's wife, beginning another seam in the new dress for her
baby.

"He goes to college in the spring; that will quiet him," said Mrs.
Bryden.

"What will he do afterward? Is he to live here? At this end of the
world--this jumping-off place?"

"I suppose so; he has always lived here. But he belongs, you know, to
the old Philadelphia family of the same name, the Peter Pronandos."

"Does he? How strange! How did he come here?"

"He was born here: Dr. Gaston told me his history. It seems that the
boy's father was a wild younger son of the second Peter, grandson, of
course, of the original Peter, from whom the family derive all their
greatness--_and_ money. This Peter the third, only his name was not
Peter, but John (the eldest sons were the Peters), wandered away from
home, and came up here, where his father's name was well known among the
directors of the Fur Company. John Pronando, who must have been of very
different fibre from the rest of the family, liked the wild life of the
border, and even went off on one or two long expeditions to the Red
River of the North and the Upper Missouri after furs with the hunters of
the Company. His father then offered him a position here which would