home. All the same, Miss Sanford, if you hear of the --th doing anything
especially lively this summer, remember that one fellow in the crowd
rides his best to win for the sake of your colors. _Au revoir._ Come,
Dandy, you scamp; now for a scamper to the Chug."

He sprang lightly into saddle, waved his hat to them, then bent low, as
by sudden impulse, and held out his hand.

"God bless you, Mrs. Stannard!" he said; and looking at her in half
surprise, they saw her eyes were brimming with tears.

Another moment and he had turned Dandy's head to the west, and was
tripping up the road past the adjutant's office. They saw him raise his
gauntleted hand in salute to the post commander, and heard his voice
call out, ringingly, "Good-day, colonel." They saw that between him and
Mr. Gleason no sign of recognition passed, and they stood in silence
watching him until, turning out at the west gate, he struck a lope and
disappeared behind the band quarters, out on the open prairie.

When Mr. Gleason touched his cap to the colonel and started to rejoin
the ladies, they saw him coming. Nobody said a word, but the three
ladies re-entered the house, Mrs. Truscott last; but it was Mrs.
Stannard who turned back in the hall and shut the door. When Gleason
reached the front gate he concluded not to enter, but went on down the
row.

CHAPTER X.

A JUNE SUNDAY.

It is a cloudless Sunday morning, the longest Sunday in that month of
longest days, warm, balmy, rose-bearing June. Only a few hours' high is
the blazing god of day, but his beams beat fiercely down on a landscape
wellnigh as arid as the Arizona our troopers knew so well. Not a breath
of air is stirring. Down in the shallow valley to the right, where the
cottonwoods are blistering beside the sandy stream-bed, a faint column
of smoke rises straight as the stem of a pine-tree until it melts into
indistinguishable air. The sandy waste goes twisting and turning in its
fringe of timber southeastward along a broad depression in the face of
the land, until twenty odd miles away it seems brought up standing by a
barrier of rugged hills that dip into the bare surface at the south, and
go rising and falling, rolling and tumbling, higher and raggeder, to the
north. All the intervening stretches are bare, tawny, sun-scorched,
except those fringing cottonwoods. All those tumbling heights are dark
and frowning through their beards of gloomy larch and pine. Black they
stand against