le for trains, and that--far more honored in the breach
than the observance. Passengers bound west of that sinfully thriving
town were luckier, as a rule, if they went by stage. Those were days,
too, in which a depot quartermaster with a drove of government mules and
a corral full of public vehicles at his command was a monarch in the
eyes of the early settlers; and when, added to these high-priced
luxuries, he had on deposit in various banks from Chicago to Cheyenne,
and even here at Gate City, thousands of dollars in government
greenbacks expendible on his check for all manner of purposes, from
officers' mileage accounts to the day laborer's wages, from bills for
the roofing of barracks and quarters to the setting of a single
horseshoe, from the purchase of forage and fuel for the dozen military
posts within range of his supply trains down to a can of axle grease.
Every one knew Burleigh's horses and habits were far more costly than
his pay would permit. Everybody supposed he had big returns from mines
and stocks and other investments. Nobody knew just what his investments
were, and only he knew how few they were and how unprofitable they had
become. Those were days when, as now, disbursing officers were forbidden
to gamble, but when, not as now, the law was a dead letter. Burleigh had
gambled for years; had, with little remorse, ruined more than one man,
and yet stood now awe-stricken and dismayed and wronged by Fate, since
luck had turned at last against him. Large sums had been lost to players
inexorable as he himself had been. Large sums had been diverted from the
government channels in his charge, some to pay his so-called debts of
honor, some to cover abstractions from other funds, "robbing Peter to
pay Paul," some to silence people who knew too much; some, ay, most of
it, in fact, to cover margins, and once money gets started on that grade
it slips through one's fingers like quicksilver. At the very moment when
Anson Burleigh's envious cronies were telling each other he stood far
ahead of the world, the figures were telling him he stood some twenty
thousand dollars behind it, and that, too, when he was confronted by two
imperative calls for spot cash, one for ten thousand to go to Warrior
Gap, another for a sum almost as big to "stake" a man who never yet had
turned an honest penny, yet held the quartermaster where he dare not say
so--where indeed he dare not say no.

"If you haven't it you know where you can ge