The Prescott daily news., 1908-04-24

Poor kid!" patrOniZed the subal terms from the prestige of their two years service
 The Daugherty clanked into Fort | Perdido in the late afternoon, the four
 mules. the boot, everything, white with alkali dust. It drew up with creaking of brakes before the adju | tants quarter and very straight. very slender. brown-eyed boy climbed out of its depths as the teamster tumbled a long military trunk from
 the boot and threw chamois-covered saber on the walk. The boy, whose l cheeks glowed through their coating l of dust like the bloom of dead ripe peach through its fuZz, stood by his | suit case and gazed about him In be- wilderment; then, as the subalterns | tlocked out to greet him who was to be one of them he stiffened cadet-wise | to attention and saluted very ceremo- niously like an officer of the day at guard mount, all of which was woe fully incongruous from a military view
 point The youngish major watched
 it all from the club window
 Like that" he sighed. And two days overdue. Poor, poor kd!"
 The subalterns took the slender boy under tutelage at once. They hurried him to the bachelor quarters; and, while their brown muchachos drew his bath and laid out his linen and fitted the bronze buttons into his painfully new khaki. they warned and coached him and commiserated with him. When he was arrayed as to uniform and girded and spurred, they walked with him to the headquarters veranda and watched him enter the low, dark doorway, while their hearts beat in sympathy with him. he was such Q clean-cut, wholesome boy. One of them went as far with him as the ad jutants desk, unconsciously tiptoeing in dread of the painful shriek of his companions new boots. The subal terms faces were framed white in the window and the adjutant and the men outside held their breath as the new boots creaked in the strained silence straight up to the dreaded door.
 dropping pin would have sounded clearly, and the boys firm tap, tap, tap shattered the stiffness and echoed in the bare room. The silence closed in again for five anxious seconds, a bass growl rumbled from the shad ows, and the boy was in the presence
 Perhaps the colonel drowsed little He often did in these latter days be- heath the kindly faces on the wall that smiled and grew dim as seen through something in his eyes. Per haps he did. for surely this was the Nashville pike that thrummed like a tocsin beneath his horses feet; and surely this was his own troop that clattered along behind him in route order; this was his own dark hair that dropped below his ears and framed his bronzed young face
 Then that last dance with the little girl with brown eyes came up in his dream.
 But with the incongruity uf dreams the colonel was far away from the Franklin pike. though journeying thereward on trip that he had long promised himself after Appomattox No troop changed behind him now. and only the rise and fall of a glossy bay shoulder met his eye as he rested on his pommel and dreamed his dream. Again he drew rein at a house near Nashville, for his destination was miles beyond and though the spires Of the city showed blue-tinged in the twilight distance. the night was roll ing in from the valleys and the road was strange. Soon he was asking a cheery young man for nights hos pitality and superintendingth the stabling of his horse
 This portion of the colonel's dream was apt to be intermittent with no ordered sequence of events worth mentioning, for now he stood with his
 back to an, open fire and his hostess
 was on the stairs There was a rustic of skirts in the hall and he had ad. yanced step toward the door and now stood with hand half raised, star ing dumbly into the pained face of a
 woman with brown eyes; and in that surge of emotion. forgetting the ! blanch of his own face or the wonder of his hosts.
 The bountiful supper was a torture
 and the endless winter evening. with the host rattling brainlessly of fields
 and stock and events, satisfied with
 abstract monosyllabic answers, was
 unbearable. A hundred times that
 sleepless, miserable night he checked l an impulse to steal down the stairs