seen. The nubs of it was, he said, that she
said her husband had taken out a troop from Fort Wingate against the
Apaches (Hill knew blame well up there in the Navajo country was no
place to look for Apaches) and the troop had been ambushed in a canon
in the Zuni Mountains (which made the story still tougher) and every
man of 'em, along with her "dear Captain" as she called him, had lost
his hair. "His loved remains are where those fierce creatures left
them," she said. "I have not even the sad solace of properly burying
his precious bones!" And she cried.

The old gent was quite broke up, Hill said, and took a-hold of her
hand fatherly--she was a powerful fine-looking woman--and said she had
his sympathy; and when she eased up on her crying so she could talk
she said she was much obliged--and felt it all the more, she said,
because he looked like a young uncle of hers who'd brought her up, her
father being dead, till she was married East to her dear Captain and
had come out to the Territory with him to his dreadful doom.

Hill said it all went so smooth he took it down himself at first--but
he got his wind while she was crying, and he asked her what her
Captain's name was, and what was his regiment; telling her he hadn't
heard of any trouble up around Wingate, and it was news to him
Apaches was in them parts. She give him a dig in the ribs with her
elbow--as much as to tell him he wasn't to ask no such questions--and
said back to him her dear husband was Captain Chiswick of the Twelfth
Cavalry; and it had been a big come down for him, she said, when
he got his commission in the Regulars, after he'd been a Volunteer
brigadier-general in the war.

Hill knowed right enough there wasn't no Twelfth Cavalry nowhere, and
that the boys at Wingate was A and F troops of the Fourth; but he
ketched on to the way she was giving it to the old gent--and so _he_
give _her_ a dig in the ribs, and said he'd knowed Captain Chiswick
intimate, and he was as good a fellow as ever was, and it was a blame
pity he was killed. She give him a dig back again, at that--and was
less particular about making room on his side.

The old gent took it all in, just as it come along; and after she'd
finished up about the Apaches killing her dear Captain he wanted to
know where she was heading for--because if she was going home East, he
said, he was going East himself and could give her a father's care.

She said back to him, pleasant like, that a young