“Yes, but, father, isn’t a good gun a gun that kills folks?  What’s the use making a gun at all if it isn’t going to kill folks?”

His father looked at him strangely.  “Sonny,” he said, “you’re hitting home rather hard.”

“Your reasoning is poor, Worth,” said Katie; “fact is we make guns to keep folks from getting killed.  If we didn’t have the guns everybody would get killed.  Now don’t say ‘why.’”

“’Cause you don’t know why,” calmly remarked Worth, adding:  “I’ll ask Watts, and if he don’t know I’ll ask the man that mends the boats.”

“Do,” said Katie.

Having, to his own satisfaction, exterminated some forty thousand million members of the human family, Worth opened attack on the puppies.  He was an Indian and they were poor white settlers and he was going to kill them.  No poor white settlers had ever received an Indian so joyously.

But he seemed to have left those forty thousand million souls on his father’s hands.  Wayne was looking very serious.  He did not respond to—­did not appear to have heard—­Katie’s remark about Worth needing some new clothes.

Katie wondered what he was thinking about; she supposed some new kind of barrel steel.  She took it for granted that nothing short of steel could produce that look.

She was proud of the things that look had done, proud of the distinction her brother had already won in the army, proud, in advance, of the things she was confident he would do.

Captain Jones was at the Arsenal on special detail.  An invention of his pertaining to the rifle was being manufactured for tests.  There was keen interest in it and its final adoption seemed assured.  It was of sufficient importance to make his name one of those conspicuous in army affairs.  He had already several lesser things—­devices pertaining to equipment—­to his credit and was looked upon as one of the most promising of the army’s men of invention.

And aside from her pride in him, Katie’s affection for her brother was deep, intensified because of their being alone.  Their father had died when Katie was sixteen, died as a result of wounds received long before in frontier skirmishes, where he had been one of those many brave men to serve fearlessly and faithfully, men who gave more to their country than their country perhaps understood.  Their mother survived him only two years.  Katie sometimes said that her mother, too, gave her life to her country.  Her health had been undermined by hard living on the frontier—­she who had been so tenderly reared in her southern home—­and in the end she also died from a wound, that wound dealt the heart in the death of her husband.  Katie revered her father’s memory and adored her mother’s, and while youth and Katie’s indomitable spirit made it hard for one to think of her as sad, the memory of those two was the deepest, biggest thing in the girl’s life.

“Oh Katie,” Wayne suddenly roused himself to say, “your cousin Fred Wayneworth is in town.  I had luncheon with him over the river.  He sent all sorts of messages to you.”