have been much more difficult.  For the life of a regimental post is as circumscribed as the life on a ship-of-war, and it would no more be possible for the ship’s barber to rub shoulders with the admiral’s epaulets than that a post-trader’s child should visit the ladies on the “line,” or that the wives of the enlisted men should dine with the young girl from whom they “took in” washing.

So, between the upper and the nether grindstones, Mary Cahill was left without the society of her own sex, and was of necessity forced to content herself with the society of the officers.  And the officers played fair.  Loyalty to Mary Cahill was a tradition at Fort Crockett, which it was the duty of each succeeding regiment to sustain.  Moreover, her father, a dark, sinister man, alive only to money-making, was known to handle a revolver with the alertness of a town-marshal.

Since the day she left the convent Mary Cahill had held but two affections:  one for this grim, taciturn parent, who brooded over her as jealously as a lover, and the other for the entire United States Army.  The Army returned her affection without the jealousy of the father, and with much more than his effusiveness.  But when Lieutenant Ranson arrived from the Philippines, the affections of Mary Cahill became less generously distributed, and her heart fluttered hourly between trouble and joy.

There were two rooms on the first floor of the post-trader’s—­this big one, which only officers and their women-folk might enter, and the other, the exchange of the enlisted men.  The two were separated by a partition of logs and hung with shelves on which were displayed calicoes, tinned meats, and patent medicines.  A door, cut in one end of the partition, with buffalo-robes for portieres, permitted Cahill to pass from behind the counter of one store to behind the counter of the other.  On one side Mary Cahill served the Colonel’s wife with many yards of silk ribbons to be converted into german favors, on the other her father weighed out bears’ claws (manufactured in Hartford, Conn., from turkey-bones) to make a necklace for Red Wing, the squaw of the Arrephao chieftain.  He waited upon everyone with gravity, and in obstinate silence.  No one had ever seen Cahill smile.  He himself occasionally joked with others in a grim and embarrassed manner.  But no one had ever joked with him.  It was reported that he came from New York, where, it was whispered, he had once kept bar on the Bowery for McTurk.

Sergeant Clancey, of G Troop, was the authority for this.  But when, presuming on that supposition, he claimed acquaintanceship with Cahill, the post-trader spread out his hands on the counter and stared at the sergeant with cold and disconcerting eyes.  “I never kept bar nowhere,” he said.  “I never been on the Bowery, never been in New York, never been east of Denver in my life.  What was it you ordered?”

“Well, mebbe I’m wrong,” growled the sergeant.