agons, Concords and ambulances, with an infantry
escort, was slowly wending its way southward toward the welcoming roofs
of old Fort Scott, with the wives and children of several families, with
Mira and her newest friend, Mrs. Plodder, with the tall, martial-looking
civilian riding in close attendance on the Cranston's equipage, basking
in the life-giving sunshine and in the thrill and hope and sweet unrest
of an ever-growing love, devoted and insistent in spite of vague and
jealous dread, for there was not the feeblest flicker of encouragement
in Miss Loomis's calm and oft-averted eyes. Langston asked himself in
the still hours of the starlit night, camping on the banks of Dismal
River, was it possible that her heart was following some soldier in the
dusty column, riding hard, riding fast long miles away to the northwest
now, eager to overtake the comrade soldiery already on the flank of the
foe, and bear a trooper's part in the battle summer so suddenly to open.
Even Percy Davies, laughing at the feeble protest of Dr. Burroughs, and
heartily congratulated by old White himself, had donned his field dress
and climbed stiffly into saddle, to ride once more with the fighting
column, to the savage disappointment of his one red foe at the
cantonments, and the utter confusion of other foes at Scott.

CHAPTER XXIX.

A hundred miles away,--a hundred as the crow flies, and not by the
tortuous route the cavalry had to follow, through a region that, all in
an hour's march, shifted its scene from the dull monotone of barren
waves of prairie to bold, beautiful heights and deep sheltered ravines
and canons, the winding thread of the Mina Ska went foaming and leaping
over its stony bed, taking occasional cat-naps in wide, shadowy
shallows, only to wake up again to wilder riot under the frowning,
fir-crested cliffs of the Black Rock Range. For many a long, sunshiny
mile it had come floating placidly eastward, issuing from the great
water-shed of the continent, drifting leisurely between low-lying,
grassy banks all criss-crossed with ancient buffalo-trails, or the
recent footprints of long-horned cattle, past the broad plateau, crowded
by the wooden walls of Fort Ransom, past the roofs and spires of
bustling Butte, a prairie metropolis, a railway and cattle town that
rivalled Braska, past long miles of gleaming tangents of the
transcontinental railway until it met the bold bluffs east of Alkali
Station and was shouldered from