A sorely-perplexed man was the post quartermaster when the rumor came out from the railway-station that Mr. Hayne had arrived and was coming to report for duty.  As a first lieutenant he would have choice of quarters over every second lieutenant in the garrison:  there were ten of these young gentlemen, and four of the ten were married.  Every set of quarters had its occupants, and Hayne could move in nowhere, unless as occupant of a room or two in the house of some comrade, without first compelling others to move out.  This proceeding would lead to vast discomfort, occurring as it would in the dead of winter, and the youngsters were naturally perturbed in spirit,—­their wives especially so.  What made the prospects infinitely worse was the fact that the cavalry bachelors were already living three in a house:  the only spare rooms were in the quarters of the second lieutenants of the infantry, and they were not on speaking-terms with Mr. Hayne.  Everything, therefore, pointed to the probability of his “displacing” a junior, who would in turn displace somebody else, and so they would go tumbling like a row of bricks until the lowest and last was reached.  All this would involve no end of worry for the quartermaster, who even under the most favorable circumstances is sure to be the least appreciated and most abused officer under the commandant himself, and that worthy was simply agasp with relief and joy when he heard Mr. Hayne’s astonishing announcement that he would take the quarters out on “Prairie Avenue.”

It was the talk of the garrison all that day.  The ladies, especially, had a good deal to say, because many of the men seemed averse to expressing their views.  “Quite the proper thing for Mr. Hayne to do,” was the apparent opinion of the majority of the young wives and mothers.  As a particularly kind and considerate thing it was not remarked by one of them, though that view of the case went not entirely unrepresented.  In choosing to live there Mr. Hayne separated himself from companionship.  That, said some of the commentators,—­men as well as women,—­he simply accepted as the virtue of necessity, and so there was nothing to commend in his action.  But Mr. Hayne was said to possess an eye for the picturesque and beautiful.  If so, he deliberately condemned himself to the daily contemplation of a treeless barren, streaked in occasional shallows with dingy patches of snow, ornamented only in spots by abandoned old hats, boots, or tin cans blown beyond the jurisdiction of the garrison police-parties.  A line of telegraph-poles was all that intervened between his fence and the low-lying hills of the eastern horizon.  Southeastward lay the distant roofs and the low, squat buildings of the frontier town; southward the shallow valley of the winding creek in which lay the long line of stables for the cavalry and the great stacks of hay; while the row on which he chose to live—­“Prairie Avenue,” as it was termed—­was far worse at his end of it