r once in a generation.

At Adobe there are only eight troops--not enough to make a German
nurse-girl turn her head in the street, and my friend from New York,
with his Napoleonic largeness, would scoff out loud. But he and the
nurse do not understand the significance; they have not the eyes to see.
A starboard or a port horseshoe would be all one to them, and a crease
in the saddle-blanket the smallest thing in the world, yet it might
spoil a horse.

When the trumpets went in the morning I was sorry I had thought at all.
It was not light yet, and I clung to my pillow. Already this cavalry has
too much energy for my taste.

"If you want to see anything, you want to lead out," said the Captain,
as he pounded me with a boot.

[Illustration: 21 THE ADVANCE]

"Say, Captain, I suppose Colonel Hamilton issues this order to get up at
this hour, doesn't he?"

"He does."

"Well, he has to obey his own order, then, doesn't he?"

"He does."

I took a good long stretch and yawn, and what I said about Colonel
Hamilton I will not commit to print, out of respect to the Colonel. Then
I got up.

This bitterness of bed-parting passes. The Captain said he would put a
"cook's police" under arrest for appearing in my make-up; but all these
details will be forgotten, and whatever happens at this hour should be
forgiven. I had just come from the North, where I had been sauntering
over the territory of Montana with some Indians and a wild man from
Virginia, getting up before light--tightening up on coffee and bacon for
twelve hours in the saddle to prepare for more bacon and coffee; but at
Adobe I had hoped for, even if I did not expect, some repose.

In the east there was a fine green coming over the sky. No one out of
the painter guild would have admitted it was green, even on the rack,
but what I mean is that you could not approach it in any other way. A
nice little adjutant went jangling by on a hard-trotting thoroughbred,
his shoulders high and his seat low. My old disease began to take
possession of me; I could fairly feel the microbes generate. Another
officer comes clattering, with his orderly following after. The fever
has me. We mount, and we are off, all going to stables.

Out from the corrals swarm the troopers, leading their unwilling mounts.
The horses are saying, "Damn the Colonel!" One of them comes in arching
bounds; he is saying worse of the Colonel, or maybe only cussing out his
own recruit for pulling his _c