rly, so expectantly, out
on life!

First, he was home from the University, from the pretty, shady little
Missouri town of Columbia. But the vacation following he spent in
bloodily helping to drive the Jayhawkers back across the Kansas line.
And soon after, when the fighting opened up officially, and his State,
at the start, had more of it than any other battle ground, how many
hundreds of times did his life bide by the next throw of Fate? During
one cruel winter month he had lain with other wounded in a hospital
dug-out in the river's cliff, and there, wanting both quinine and food,
he would peep through the reeds, only to see the merciless Red Legs
prying about in search of his hiding place.

And then there was the wild, busily dangerous life with Old Joe's
Brigade, with that brigade of Missouri's young firebrands. Once,
stretched on the prairie, where he had dropped from exhaustion and
hunger and loss of blood, the Storm Centre awoke to find a Pin Indian
stooping over him for his scalp. On that occasion, the deft turning of
the wrist from the waist outward, with the stripping of the pistol's
hammer simultaneously, had enabled him later to restore to relatives
certain other scalps already dangling from the savage's girdle.

And now here he was in an adobe with walls two feet thick, and numerous
saddle-colored Greasers proposing to shoot him first thing in the
morning!

"I'll be blessedly damned," he drawled querulously, "I object!"

It was the warrior who spoke now, and with him the boy joined hands.
They became as one and the same person. The common foe was without. They
would see this through together, with grim stoicism, with young-blooded
daredeviltry.

The door opened, and one of the common foe, bearing a tray, came within.

"Well, Don Erastus, how goes it?" With a pang of homesickness the
Missourian thought of darkies who carried trays.

"Juan Bautista, at Y'r Mercy's orders," the Dragoon corrected him.

"Don John the Baptist then, como le whack?"

"Bien, senor, bien."

"Any theory as to what you've got there?"

"Y'r Mercy's supper. The Senor Coronel Lopez does not desire that Y'r
Mercy should have any complaint."

"Oh, none whatever, Johnny, except what I'm to die of. Set it down, here
on the feather bed."

There were a few native dishes, with a botellon of water and a jar of
wine. Driscoll tipped the botellon to his lips. His whiskey flask had
contained poison, though the poison of ink, and as