CHAPTER V—­GENERAL ALISON TO MERCEDES

She has been with us a good nice long time, now.  You are troubled about your sprite because this is such a wild frontier, hundreds of miles from civilization, and peopled only by wandering tribes of savages?  You fear for her safety?  Give yourself no uneasiness about her.  Dear me, she’s in a nursery! and she’s got more than eighteen hundred nurses.  It would distress the garrison to suspect that you think they can’t take care of her.  They think they can.  They would tell you so themselves.  You see, the Seventh Cavalry has never had a child of its very own before, and neither has the Ninth Dragoons; and so they are like all new mothers, they think there is no other child like theirs, no other child so wonderful, none that is so worthy to be faithfully and tenderly looked after and protected.  These bronzed veterans of mine are very good mothers, I think, and wiser than some other mothers; for they let her take lots of risks, and it is a good education for her; and the more risks she takes and comes successfully out of, the prouder they are of her.  They adopted her, with grave and formal military ceremonies of their own invention—­solemnities is the truer word; solemnities that were so profoundly solemn and earnest, that the spectacle would have been comical if it hadn’t been so touching.  It was a good show, and as stately and complex as guard-mount and the trooping of the colors; and it had its own special music, composed for the occasion by the bandmaster of the Seventh; and the child was as serious as the most serious war-worn soldier of them all; and finally when they throned her upon the shoulder of the oldest veteran, and pronounced her “well and truly adopted,” and the bands struck up and all saluted and she saluted in return, it was better and more moving than any kindred thing I have seen on the stage, because stage things are make-believe, but this was real and the players’ hearts were in it.

It happened several weeks ago, and was followed by some additional solemnities.  The men created a couple of new ranks, thitherto unknown to the army regulations, and conferred them upon Cathy, with ceremonies suitable to a duke.  So now she is Corporal-General of the Seventh Cavalry, and Flag-Lieutenant of the Ninth Dragoons, with the privilege (decreed by the men) of writing U.S.A. after her name!  Also, they presented her a pair of shoulder-straps—­both dark blue, the one with F. L. on it, the other with C. G. Also, a sword.  She wears them.  Finally, they granted her the salute.  I am witness that that ceremony is faithfully observed by both parties—­and most gravely and decorously, too.  I have never seen a soldier smile yet, while delivering it, nor Cathy in returning it.