rd went dead against him, and stout old soldiers thereon
cast their votes with grieving hearts, for "Billy Ray's Boy" was a lad
they hated to let go, but West Point rules are inexorable.

So too were there saddened hearts far out on the frontier where the
major was commanding a cavalry post in a busy summer, but neither he nor
Marion had one word of blame or reproach for the boy. Loving arms, and
eyes that smiled through their sorrow, welcomed him when the little chap
returned to them. "Don't anybody come to meet me," he wrote. "Just let
mother be home." And so it was settled.

He sprang from the wagon that met him at the station, went hand in hand
with his father into the hall, and then, with one sob, bounded into
Marion's outstretched arms as she stood awaiting him in the little army
parlor.

The major softly closed the door and with blinking eyes stole away to
stables. There had been another meeting a little later when Marion the
second was admitted, and the girl stole silently to her brother's side
and her arms twined about his neck. Her love for him had been something
like adoration through all the years of girlhood, and now, though he was
twenty and she eighteen, its fervor seemed to know no diminution. They
had done their best, all of them, to encourage while the struggle
lasted, but to teach him that should failure come, it would come without
reproach or shame.

The path to success in other fields was still before him. The road to
the blessed refuge of home and love and sympathy would never close.

It was hard to reconcile the lad at first. The major set him up as a
young ranchman in a lovely valley in the Big Horn Range, and there he
went sturdily to work, but before the winter was fairly on the country
was rousing to the appeals of Cuba, and before it was gone the Maine had
sunk, a riddled hulk, and the spring came in with a call to arms.

Together with some two hundred young fellows all over the land, Sanford
Ray went up for examination for the vacant second lieutenancies in the
army, and he who had failed in analytical and calculus passed without
grave trouble the more practical ordeal demanded by the War Department,
was speedily commissioned in the artillery, and, to his glory and
delight, promptly transferred to the cavalry.

Then came the first general break up the family had really known, for
the major hurried away to Kentucky to assume command of the regiment of
volunteers of which he had been ma