y friends--included in this new depa'tyuh?"

"The difficulty applies generally, Mr. Gilet."

"Do I understand the Gove'nuh to insinuate--nay, gentlemen, do not rise!
Be seated, I beg." For the Councillors had leaped to their feet.

"Whar's our money?" said Pete Cawthon. "Our money was put in thet yere
box."

Ballard flushed angrily, but a knock at the door stopped him, and he
merely said, "Come in."

A trooper, a corporal, stood at the entrance, and the disordered Council
endeavored to look usual in a stranger's presence. They resumed their
seats, but it was not easy to look usual on such short notice.

"Captain Paisley's compliments," said the soldier, mechanically, "and
will Governor Ballard take supper with him this evening?"

"Thank Captain Paisley," said the Governor (his tone was quite usual),
"and say that official business connected with the end of the session
makes it imperative for me to be at the State-House. Imperative."

The trooper withdrew. He was a heavy-built, handsome fellow, with black
mustache and black eyes that watched through two straight, narrow slits
beneath straight black brows. His expression in the Council Chamber had
been of the regulation military indifference, and as he went down the
steps he irrelevantly sang an old English tune:

"'Since first I saw your face I resolved
To honor and re--'

"I guess," he interrupted himself as he unhitched his horse, "parrot and
monkey hev broke loose."

The Legislature, always in its shirt-sleeves, the cards on the table,
and the toddy on the floor, sat calm a moment, cooled by this brief
pause from the first heat of its surprise, while the clatter of Corporal
Jones's galloping shrank quickly into silence.

II

Captain Paisley walked slowly from the adjutant's office at Boise
Barracks to his quarters, and his orderly walked behind him. The captain
carried a letter in his hand, and the orderly, though distant a
respectful ten paces, could hear him swearing plain as day. When he
reached his front door Mrs. Paisley met him.

"Jim," cried she, "two more chickens froze in the night." And the
delighted orderly heard the captain so plainly that he had to blow his
nose or burst.

The lady, merely remarking "My goodness, Jim," retired immediately to
the kitchen, where she had a soldier cook baking, and feared he was not
quite sober enough to do it alone. The captain had paid eighty dollars
for forty hens this year at Boise, and twen