rie
were shut out to them, and for those who asked not for either of
these amusements, there was a tastefully, but not ostentatiously,
furnished drawing-room, with one of the best pianos made in those
days, which he had had imported at a great expense from the capital
of the western world, and at which his amiable and only daughter
generally presided.

Margaret McKenzie had been born at Chicago, but having lost her
mother at an early age, her father, profiting by one of his periodical
visits to New York, had taken her with him for the purpose of
receiving such an education as would enable her not only to grace
a drawing-room, and make her a companion to a man of sense and
refinement, but to fit her for those more domestic duties which
the uncertain character of so secluded a life might occasionally
render necessary, and where luxury and education alone were
insufficient to a trading husband's views of happiness. After five
years' absence, she had returned to Chicago, a girl of strong mind,
warm affection, without the slightest affectation, and altogether
so adapted in manner and education--for she eminently combined the
useful with the ornamental--that her father was delighted with
her, not less for the proficiency she had made in all that
gives value to society, but because of the utter absence of all
appearance of regret in abandoning the gay and enlivening scenes
of the fascinating capital, in which she had spent so many years,
for the still, dull monotony of the primeval forest in which her
childhood had been passed.

But here she was not doomed to "waste her sweetness on the desert
air." There were only two officers in the garrison, besides Captain
Headley, when Miss McKenzie returned to her native wilds--Doctor
Von Voltenberg and Lieut. Elmsley. The third who made up the number
of those attached to the company had a few days previously been
shot and scalped by a party of Indians near Hardscrabble, while on
his return to the fort from shooting the hen, or English grouse,
of the prairie. His place was supplied by Ensign Ronayne, who had
joined the garrison a few days after. Lieutenant Elmsley, captivated
by the accomplishments and amiability of the fascinating Margaret,
had offered her his heart and hand, and obtained her unreluctant
promise speedily to share his barrack room, some twenty feet by
twelve in dimensions. Meanwhile, in order to prove to him how well
she was fitted to be a soldier's wife, not an arti