ts occupants, and Hayne could move in nowhere, unless as
occupant of a room or two in the house of some comrade, without first
compelling others to move out. This proceeding would lead to vast
discomfort, occurring as it would in the dead of winter, and the
youngsters were naturally perturbed in spirit,--their wives especially
so. What made the prospects infinitely worse was the fact that the
cavalry bachelors were already living three in a house: the only spare
rooms were in the quarters of the second lieutenants of the infantry,
and they were not on speaking-terms with Mr. Hayne. Everything,
therefore, pointed to the probability of his "displacing" a junior, who
would in turn displace somebody else, and so they would go tumbling like
a row of bricks until the lowest and last was reached. All this would
involve no end of worry for the quartermaster, who even under the most
favorable circumstances is sure to be the least appreciated and most
abused officer under the commandant himself, and that worthy was simply
agasp with relief and joy when he heard Mr. Hayne's astonishing
announcement that he would take the quarters out on "Prairie Avenue."

It was the talk of the garrison all that day. The ladies, especially,
had a good deal to say, because many of the men seemed averse to
expressing their views. "Quite the proper thing for Mr. Hayne to do,"
was the apparent opinion of the majority of the young wives and mothers.
As a particularly kind and considerate thing it was not remarked by one
of them, though that view of the case went not entirely unrepresented.
In choosing to live there Mr. Hayne separated himself from
companionship. That, said some of the commentators,--men as well as
women,--he simply accepted as the virtue of necessity, and so there was
nothing to commend in his action. But Mr. Hayne was said to possess an
eye for the picturesque and beautiful. If so, he deliberately condemned
himself to the daily contemplation of a treeless barren, streaked in
occasional shallows with dingy patches of snow, ornamented only in spots
by abandoned old hats, boots, or tin cans blown beyond the jurisdiction
of the garrison police-parties. A line of telegraph-poles was all that
intervened between his fence and the low-lying hills of the eastern
horizon. Southeastward lay the distant roofs and the low, squat
buildings of the frontier town; southward the shallow valley of the
winding creek in which lay the long line of stables f