his father and mother in having
once more under their roof the soldier son who had won an honored name
in his profession, and in their delight in the exuberant health and
antics of two sturdy, plains-bred little Cranstons. The visit proved one
continuous round of home pleasures and social gayeties, for Margaret
Cranston had been a stanch favorite in the days of her girl- and
bellehood, and all her old friends, married and single, rose _en masse_
to welcome her return. Parties, dances, dinners, concerts, theatre and
opera, lectures, pictures, parks, drives and rides,--all the endless
resources of the metropolitan world had been laid at the feet of the
girl who, leaving them to follow her soldier lover to his exile and
wanderings, had returned in the fulness of time, in the flush of
womanhood, a proud wife and proud and happy mother. People could not
understand her choice at the time of her marriage: "Cranston's all
right, but the idea of going to live in a tent or dug-out," was the
popular way of putting it, and people were still unable to understand
how she could have ever found anything to enjoy in that wild life or to
make her wish to see it again. It was, therefore, incomprehensible to
society that she and her two bouncing boys were utterly overwhelmed with
distress at having to remain in so charming a circle, so happy a home,
when it came time for the captain to return. Society even resented it a
little. Juvenile society--feminine--took it amiss that the Cranston boys
should so scorn the arts of peace, and persist furthermore in saying the
buffalo and bear and wolves in the municipal "Zoo" were frauds as
compared with what they had seen "any day" all around them out on the
plains. Tremendous stories did these little Nimrods tell of the big game
on which they had tired of dining, but some of their tales were true,
and that's what made it so hard for junior society masculine, in which
there wasn't a boy who did not honestly and justly hate these young
frontiersmen, even while envying with all his civilized heart. Loud was
the merriment at school over the Cranstons' blunders in spelling and
arithmetic, but what--what was that as offset to their prowess on
pony-back, their skill with the bow and sling-shot, their store of
Indian trinkets, trophies, ay, even to the surreptitiously shown Indian
scalp? What was that to the tales of tremendous adventure in the land of
the Sioux and Apache,--the home of the bear and the buffa