“Right here in my saddle-bags under my head.  Nobody can touch them that I do not wake; and my revolver is here under the blanket.  Hold on!  Let’s take a look and see if everything is all right.”  He holds a little camp-lantern over the bags, opens the flap, and peers in.  “Yes,—­all serene.  I got a big hunk of green sealing-wax from the paymaster and sealed it all up in one package with the memorandum-list inside.  It’s all safe so far,—­even to the hunk of sealing-wax.—­What is it, sergeant?”

A tall, soldierly, dark-eyed trooper appears at the door-way of the little tent, and raises his gauntleted hand in salute.  His language, though couched in the phraseology of the soldier, tells both in choice of words and in the intonation of every phrase that he is a man whose antecedents have been far different from those of the majority of the rank and file: 

“Will the captain permit me to take my horse and those of three or four more men outside the corral?  Sergeant Clancy says he has no authority to allow it.  We have found a patch of excellent grass, sir, and there is hardly any left inside.  I will sleep by my picket-pin, and one of us will keep awake all the time, if the captain will permit.”

“How far away is it, sergeant?”

“Not seventy-five yards, sir,—­close to the river-bank east of us.”

“Very well.  Send Sergeant Clancy here, and I’ll give the necessary orders.”

The soldier quietly salutes, and disappears in the gathering darkness.

“That’s what I like about that man Gower,” says the captain, after a moment’s silence.  “He is always looking out for his horse.  If he were not such a gambler and rake he would make a splendid first-sergeant.  Fine-looking fellow, isn’t he?”

“Yes, sir.  That is a face that one couldn’t well forget.  Who was the other sergeant you overhauled for getting fleeced by those sharps at the cantonment?”

“Clancy?  He’s on guard to-night.  A very different character.”

“I don’t know him by sight as yet.  Well, good-night, sir.  I’ll take myself off and go to my own tent.”

* * * * *

Daybreak again, and far to the east the sky is all ablaze.  The mist is creeping from the silent shallows under the banks, but all is life and vim along the shore.  With cracking whip, tugging trace, sonorous blasphemy, and ringing shout, the long train is whirling ahead almost at the run.  All is athrill with excitement, and bearded faces have a strange, set look about the jaws, and eyes gleam with eager light and peer searchingly from every rise far over to the southeast, where stands a tumbling heap of hills against the lightening sky.  “Off there, are they?” says a burly trooper, dismounting hastily to tighten up the “cinch” of his weather-beaten saddle.  “We can make it quick enough, ’s soon as we get rid of these blasted wagons.”  And, swinging into saddle again, he goes cantering down the slope, his charger snorting with exhilaration in the keen morning air.