only once to penetrate beyond the veil of
that professional reserve which they assume, and the details of one
another's lives are not such guarded secrets, after all."

"And you really mean that from them--among them you have learned
these--these----"

"These particulars of Mr. Forrest's sudden orders to leave the city?"
said Elmendorf, dryly, with another shrug. "From where else? Even to the
name and station of the lady in the case."

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER IV.

Not half a mile away from the Allisons' costly residence was the home of
Major Cranston, an officer of some thirty years' experience in the
cavalry. It was an unpretentious, old-fashioned frame house, that had
escaped the deluge of fire that swept the city in '71, and that looked
oddly out of place now in the midst of towering apartment blocks or
handsome edifices of brick and stone. But Cranston loved the old place,
and preferred to keep it intact and as left to him at the death of his
father until such time as he should retire from active service. Then he
might see fit to rebuild. The property was now of infinitely more value
than the house. "You could move that old barrack out to the suburbs, cut
down them trees, and cut up the place into buildin'-lots and sell any
one of them for enough to build a dozen better houses," said a neighbor
who had prospered, as had the Cranstons, by holding on to the paternal
estate. But Cranston smilingly said he preferred not to cut up or cut
down. "Them" trees and he had grown up together. They were saplings
when he was a boy, and had grown to sturdy oakhood when his own
youngsters, plains-bred little cavaliers, used to gather their Chicago
friends about them under the whispering leaves and thrill their juvenile
souls with stirring tales of their doings "out in the Indian county."
Louis Cranston was believed to have participated with his father's troop
in many a pitched battle with the savage foe before his tenth birthday,
and "Patchie," the younger, was known to be so called not because of his
mother's having sprung from the distinguished family in which George
Patchen was a patron saint, but because he had been born in the Arizona
mountains and rocked in a Tonto cradle. Those two boys were now stalwart
men, cattle-growers in the Far West, whose principal interest in Chicago
was as a market for their branded steers. They had their own vines and
fig-trees, their own wives and olive-branches, an