The Colonel's Daughter: Winning His Spurs

“Sir-r-r!” and the rasp and rattle of a hastily-moved chair preceded but an instant the appearance of a soldierly form in the doorway.

“That Prescott mail’s late again to-day?”

“Yes, sir; been late every time last three trips.”

The sergeant-major clips his words as close as his cropped hair and uses no superfluities. Having said so much he waits, mutely “standing attention,” for his superior’s next remark. The latter is dreamily contemplating a pair of rather shapely feet perched on the desk in front of him, and tapping the boot-toes thereof with a long ruler. Finally he queries,—

“Think that man Finnegan’s been drinking again?”

“Looks like it, sir; but can’t say. Horse shows hard riding every night when he gets in; but you can see him for six miles up the valley, and he comes at an easy lope all the way from the Point.”

The adjutant slowly lets down his long legs, quits his chair, takes from its case a signal-service binocular and saunters to the open doorway leading to the parade. His subordinate remains a moment, in his invariable attitude, at the door of the inner office, then, finding himself addressed no further, steps back quickly as he came.

Leaning against the post of the narrow piazza in front, the adjutant blinked his eyes in unwilling deference to the blazing sunlight and gazed out towards the north.

Before him, straight away, lay a level barren of gravelly earth, brown and desolate: no sprig of grass, no sign of shrub or tree; the parade of Camp Sandy, in the year of our Lord 187-, was as bald as the head of the commanding officer. Midway between the office and the glistening white line of picket-fence that spanned the northern limit of the garrison a lance-like staff shot upward into the burning vault of heaven, and from its summit hung motionless the heavy folds of blue and scarlet and white, the symbol of Yankee supremacy in the midst of surrounding desolation. It hung aloft as though paralyzed with wonderment at its unlovely companionship,—

“It hung in the heat like some bright dead bird,

And the air was so still you could hear the tramp

Of the pacing sentry all over the camp.”

Bounding this arid surface on right and left were two long lines of adobe buildings. Those on the eastern side, with their broad piazzas and mansard-roofs, indicating in greater pretence the homes of the officers of the command; those on the left, low, one-storied, and colorless as the dun hue of the parade itself, the quarters of the men.

Beyond the former, a thousand yards away, rose a turreted palisade of conglomerate shale and yielding sandy earth that shut out wall-like all view to the east. At its foot rolled the shallow stream from which the post derived its sole supply of water. It never seemed to rain at Camp Sandy, though torrents might be descending in the mountains that shut it in. To the west, beyond the line of barracks, lay, in the same colorless clods of adobe, the cavalry stables,—the quartermaster’s “corrals,”—and beyond them tumbled heaps of foot-hill rolling higher and higher until, in the near distance, they rose a thousand feet above the plateau and joined the long ridge of mountain-chain that stretched down, claw-like, from the grand range of the California Sierra. Northward the eye roamed over a valley hemmed in towards the setting sun by dark, pine-covered mountains, while on the other side, vivid, dazzling, scintillating in the blazing rays, lay the barren yet brilliant cliffs of the Red Rock country. The winding fringe of cottonwood in the valley depths—a lively green contrasted with the sombre hue of all nature near it—marked the course of the stream, and far, far to the north, plumb under the spot where the pole-star glowed at night, a snow-capped peak glistened and shimmered through the heated air, the one gleam of blessed coolness vouchsafed in the entire picture.

Still holding his binocular in his listless hand, the adjutant lounged in the shade of the porch, and gazed drearily over the scene before him. Save the occasional lizard, darting about the sun-baked parade, no sign of life or motion greeted the eye. Along “officers’ row” every blind was tightly closed against the blazing west. One or two sleeping forms could be detected along the shade-line of the opposite “quarters”; but even at the guard-house the sentry had been drawn inside, and was pacing the narrow corridor in front of the barred windows, through which swarthy, hungry-eyed Apache faces were doubtless glaring out in miserable hatred of their captors.

It was a cheerless scene, and in face and form, expression and attitude, there could be detected on the part of the one visibly wakeful being a thorough appreciation of its dreariness. Tall, “six feet two in his stockings,” lithe and thin in flank, but with massive shoulders and powerful limbs, the adjutant’s form would have enraptured the life guardsmen of England. Clad in the coolest of white duck and flannel, every line of his frame was patent to the observer, and the head and face were fitting accompaniment. Eyes of darkest hazel, a straight, slender, broad-nostriled nose, a mouth firm and clear-cut under the curling moustache, chin and jaw square, resolute, and clean-shaven, forehead broad and white, in odd contrast to the bronze that spread over face and neck, hair that might have been dark and wavy in boyish days, but now close-cropped to the shapely head, the adjutant was well termed among his comrades a “splendid-looking fellow.” Yet at this moment the whole face was marred by its expression of utter weariness and discontent.