e Canadian
Rivers, was one of these thus suddenly requisitioned, merely because
he chanced to be discovered unemployed by the harassed commander of
a cantonment just without the environs of Carson City. Twenty minutes
later he was riding swiftly into the northwest, bearing important news
to General Sheridan, commander of the Department, who happened at that
moment to be at Fort Cairnes. To Keith this had been merely another page
in a career of adventure; for him to take his life in his hands had
long ago become an old story. He had quietly performed the special duty
allotted him, watched a squadron of troopers trot forth down the valley
of the Republican, received the hasty thanks of the peppery little
general, and then, having nothing better to do, traded his horse in
at the government corral for a fresh mount and started back again for
Carson City. For the greater portion of two nights and a day he had been
in the saddle, but he was accustomed to this, for he had driven more
than one bunch of longhorns up the Texas trail; and as he had slept
three hours at Cairnes, and as his nerves were like steel, the thought
of danger gave him slight concern. He was thoroughly tired, and it
rested him to get out of the saddle, while the freshness of the morning
air was a tonic, the very breath of which made him forgetful of fatigue.

After all, this was indeed the very sort of experience which appealed to
him, and always had--this life of peril in the open, under the stars and
the sky. He had constantly experienced it for so long now, eight years,
as to make it seem merely natural. While he ploughed steadily forward
through the shifting sand of the coulee, his thought drifted idly back
over those years, and sometimes he smiled, and occasionally frowned, as
various incidents returned to memory. It had been a rough life, yet
one not unusual to those of his generation. Born of excellent family in
tidewater Virginia, his father a successful planter, his mother had died
while he was still in early boyhood, and he had grown up cut off from
all womanly influence. He had barely attained his majority, a senior at
William and Mary's College, when the Civil War came; and one month
after Virginia cast in her lot with the South, he became a sergeant in
a cavalry regiment commanded by his father. He had enjoyed that life
and won his spurs, yet it had cost. There was much not over pleasant
to remember, and those strenuous years of almost ceaseless