the stable sergeant and grooms, there to stay to feed, guard,
and water the horses. Unless the roofs blew away, and all were buried in
drifts, there was safety, if not comfort, in the sheltered flats below
the bluffs.

But the telegraph wires went with the first hour. The stage, of course,
couldn't be hoped to return from town, and, so far as getting news from
the surrounding universe was concerned, Fort Cushing might as well have
been in Nova Zembla. And the Sumters, three, with Miriam Arnold, had
set forth at noon, intending to intercept the east-bound express, and
the colonel's spirit was raging in sympathy with the storm, and in spite
of his wife, for some one had started a tale that Sumter and his
household had ostentatiously called upon Robert Ray Lanier, in close
arrest, in utter disfavor and inferential disgrace.

Now, while an officer in arrest may not quit his quarters under seven
days, and may not even thereafter visit his commanding officer unless
ordered, or his brother officers unless authorized by that magnate,
there is no regulation prohibiting other officers or their households
visiting him. Nevertheless, they who publicly do so lay themselves
liable to the imputation of sympathizing with the accused at the expense
of the accuser, and some commanding officers are so sensitive that they
look upon such demonstrations as utterly subversive of discipline, and
aimed directly at them.

And of such was Colonel Button, a brave soldier, a gentleman at heart, a
kind, if crotchety, commander, and a lenient man rather than a
disciplinarian. Much given, himself, to criticism of his own superiors
or contemporaries, he could not abide it that he should lack the full
and enthusiastic support, much less be made the object of the criticism,
of his officers or men. A vain man, was Button, and dearly he loved the
adulation of his comrades, high or low. Veteran Irish sergeants knew
well how to reach the soft side of "The Old Man." Astute troop
commanders, like Snaffle, saved themselves many a deserved wigging by
judicious use of blarney. Sterling, straightforward men like Major
Stannard, like Sumter, Raymond, and Truscott, of his captains--men who
could not fawn and would not flatter--were never Button's intimates. He
admired them; he respected them; but down in his heart he did not like
them, because they were, in a word, independent.

And during the long and trying campaign that began early in June and
closed only lat