The Sergeant’s eyes smiled, turning away from her face to stare out again across the river.

“Because I had seen your picture.”

“My picture?  But you told us you were from Fort Union?”

“Yes; that is my station, only I had been sent to the cantonment on the Cimarron with despatches.  Your father was in command there, and worried half to death about you.  He could not leave the post, and the only officer remaining there with him was a disabled cavalry captain.  Every man he could trust was out on scouting service.  He took a chance on me.  Maybe he liked my looks, I don’t know; more probably, he judged I would n’t be a sergeant and entrusted with those despatches I ’d just brought in, if I was n’t considered trustworthy.  Anyhow I had barely fallen asleep when the orderly called me, and that was what was wanted—­that I ride north and head you off.”

“But you were not obliged to go?”

“No; I was not under your father’s orders.  I doubt if I would have consented if I had n’t been shown your picture.  I could n’t very well refuse then.”

She sat with hands clasped together, her eyes shadowed by long lashes.

“I should have thought there would have been some soldiers there—­his own men.”

“There were,” dryly, “but the army just now is recruited out of pretty tough material.  To be in the ranks is almost a confession of good-for-nothingness.  You are an officer’s daughter and understand this to be true.”

“Yes,” she answered doubtfully.  “I have been brought up thinking so; only, of course, there are exceptions.”

“No doubt, and I hope I am already counted one.”

“You know you are.  My father trusted you, and so do I.”

“I have wondered some times,” he said musingly, watching her face barely visible in the dawn, “whether those of your class actually considered us as being really human, as anything more valuable than mere food for powder.  I came into the regular army at the close of the war from the volunteer service.  I was accustomed to discipline and all that, and knew my place.  But I never suspected then that a private soldier was considered a dog.  Yet that was the first lesson I was compelled to learn.  It has been pretty hard sometimes to hold in, for there was a time when I had some social standing and could resent an insult.”

She was looking straight at him, surprised at the bitterness in his voice.

“They carry it altogether too far,” she said.  “I have often thought that—­mostly the young officers, the West Pointers—­and yet you know that the majority of enlisted men are—­well, dragged from the slums.  My father says it has been impossible to recruit a good class since the war closed, that the right kind had all the army they wanted.”

“Which is true enough, but there are good men nevertheless, and every commander knows it.  A little considerate treatment would make them better still.”