you'd think twice before you ordered me under
arrest."

The lieutenant half starts from the bench; but his self-control is
strong.

"You are simply adding to your insubordination, sir," he says, coldly.
"Take your prisoner, sergeant. You men are all witnesses to this
language."

And muttering much to himself, Teamster Rix is marched slowly away,
leaving an audience somewhat mystified. The colonel stands looking after
him with a puzzled and astonished face; the men begin slowly to edge
away, and then Mr. Abbot wearily rises and--again he flushes red when he
finds his superior officer facing him at not three paces distance.

"What on earth does that mean, Abbot?" asks the colonel. "Who is that
man?"

"One of the regimental teamsters, sir. He came here with the wounded,
and there appears to have been no opportunity of sending him back now
that the regiment is over in the Shenandoah. At all events, he has been
allowed to loaf around here for some time, and you probably heard him
swearing."

"I did; that's what brought me out of the house. But what does he mean
by threatening you?"

"I have no idea, sir; or, rather, I have an idea, but the matter is of
no consequence whatever, and only characteristic of the man. He is a
scoundrel, I suspect, and I wonder that Hollins has kept him so long."

"Do you know that Hollins hasn't turned up yet?"

"So I heard this morning, colonel, and yet you saw him the night of the
battle, did you not?"

"Not the night after, but the night before. We left him with the wagons
when we marched to the ford. I was knocked off my horse about one in the
afternoon, just north of the cornfield, and they got me back to the
wagons with this left shoulder all out of shape--collar-bone broken; and
he wasn't there then, and hadn't been seen since daybreak. Somebody said
he was so cut up when you were hit at the Gap. I didn't know you were
such friends."

"Well, we've known each other a long time--were together at Harvard and
moved in the same set; but there was never any intimacy, colonel."

"I see, I see," says the older officer, reflectively. "He was a stranger
to me when I joined the regiment and found him quartermaster. He was
Colonel Raymond's choice, and you know that in succeeding to his place
I preferred to make no changes. But I say to you now that I wish I had.
Hollins has failed to come up to the standard as a campaign
quartermaster, and the men have suffered through his neglect more