r coming to Cushing, four weeks agone, she had been watching,
waiting, listening, often weeping, and when letters came for her, with
the postmark of Fetterman or Laramie, Red Cloud or the cantonment in the
Hills, he could not but note her feverish eagerness and her instant
escape to her own room to read her treasure alone. Oh, yes, he knew they
must be from Rawdon. He had liked the lad, knew there was good stuff in
him, and he could not bear that fellow Fitzroy, who was a military loan
shark, a man who fattened on the needs or weaknesses of his comrades. He
hated to think of his bonny girl's losing her heart to Fitzroy. He owned
he rather welcomed Rawdon's advances and rejoiced that she, too, seemed
to prefer him.

But--God! He had never looked for--this! Oh, where had she gone?--and
why? He had found her at home and in tears after the fire. All morning
long she had been in an agony of nervousness. Then that afternoon, some
time, somehow, she got a message or letter, and then, kissing him and
saying she would be better in bed, had gone to her room, but not to
sleep. At eleven o'clock old Chloe's sobbing aroused him. He found it
all deserted. Dora had disappeared, leaving not one word to comfort him.

They lost no time, those men of the field and the frontier. Stannard was
dressed and out in twenty minutes; had summoned Ennis, Field, and others
among the young officers; had routed out half a troop and could have had
the entire garrison, for few were the soldiers who would not search all
night or work all day for good old Mayhew and his pretty daughter.
Perhaps that was one reason why, until this night, so many maids and
mothers among the sergeants' families envied and slandered her. Mayhew
had been far from wise, and Dora, indeed, had none to guide. Kindly and
cordially treated as he and she had been by the officers and their
wives--being, in fact, superior socially to the Snaffle household, if
not to certain others--there was yet this bar to hold them back: they
dined and danced not with the "commissioned" element of the post whereat
Mayhew was stationed. They were of finer clay than the people of the
rank and file, and so, with the families of the forage and wagon-master,
the chief packer and old Ordnance Sergeant Shell, they made up a little
middle class of their own, when Dora's heart had gone out, ungrudgingly,
to handsome, clever, educated George Rawdon, whom all men could see had
been reared among gentlefolk, and