followed, that strenuous year in New York, is
beyond my power.

That summer gave Jack his promotion to a Major, but the anxiety and the
terrible strain of official work broke down his health entirely, and in
the following winter the doctors sent him to Florida, to recuperate.

After six weeks in St. Augustine, we returned to New York. The stress
of the war was over; the Major was ordered to Governor's Island as Chief
Quartermaster, Department of the East, and in the following year he was
retired, by operation of the law, at the age limit.

I was glad to rest from the incessant changing of stations; the life
had become irksome to me, in its perpetual unrest. I was glad to find a
place to lay my head, and to feel that we were not under orders; to find
and to keep a roof-tree, under which we could abide forever.

In 1903, by an act of Congress, the veterans of the Civil War, who had
served continuously for thirty years or more were given an extra
grade, so now my hero wears with complacency the silver leaf of the
Lieutenant-Colonel, and is enjoying the quiet life of a civilian.

But that fatal spirit of unrest from which I thought to escape, and
which ruled my life for so many years, sometimes asserts its power,
and at those times my thoughts turn back to the days when we were all
Lieutenants together, marching across the deserts and mountains of
Arizona; back to my friends of the Eighth Infantry, that historic
regiment, whose officers and men fought before the walls of Chapultepec
and Mexico, back to my friends of the Sixth Cavalry, to the days at Camp
MacDowell, where we slept under the stars, and watched the sun rise from
behind the Four Peaks of the MacDowell Mountains: where we rode the
big cavalry horses over the sands of the Maricopa desert, swung in our
hammocks under the ramadas; swam in the red waters of the Verde River,
ate canned peaches, pink butter and commissary hams, listened for the
scratching of the centipedes as they scampered around the edges of our
canvas-covered floors, found scorpions in our slippers, and rattlesnakes
under our beds.

The old post is long since abandoned, but the Four Peaks still stand,
wrapped in their black shadows by night, and their purple colors by day,
waiting for the passing of the Apache and the coming of the white man,
who shall dig his canals in those arid plains, and build his cities upon
the ruins of the ancient Aztec dwellings.

The Sixth Cavalry, as well as the E