“Oh, come, now, captain,” laughed Rollins, “Jerrold’s no such slouch as you make him out.  He’s lazy, and he likes to spoon, and he puts up with a good deal of petting from the girls,—­who wouldn’t, if he could get it?—­but he is jolly and big-hearted, and don’t put on any airs,—­with us, at least,—­and the mess like him first-rate.  ’Tain’t his fault that he’s handsome and a regular lady-killer.  You must admit that he had a pretty tough four years of it up there at that cussed old Indian graveyard, and it’s only natural he should enjoy getting here, where there are theatres and concerts and operas and dances and dinners—­”

“Yes, dances and dinners and daughters,—­all delightful, I know, but no excuse for a man’s neglecting his manifest duty, as he is doing and has been ever since we got here.  Any other time the colonel would have straightened him out; but no use trying it now, when both women in his household are as big fools about the man as anybody in town,—­bigger, unless I’m a born idiot.”  And Chester rose excitedly.

“I suppose he had Miss Renwick pretty much to himself to-night?” he presently demanded, looking angrily and searchingly at his junior, as though half expecting him to dodge the question.

“Oh, yes.  Why not?  It’s pretty evident she would rather dance and be with him than with any one else:  so what can a fellow do?  Of course we ask her to dance, and all that, and I think he wants us to; but I cannot help feeling rather a bore to her, even if she is only eighteen, and there are plenty of pleasant girls in the garrison who don’t get any too much attention, now we’re so near a big city, and I like to be with them.”

“Yes, and it’s the right thing for you to do, youngster.  That’s one trait I despise in Jerrold.  When we were up there at the stockade two winters ago, and Captain Gray’s little girl was there, he hung around her from morning till night, and the poor little thing fairly beamed and blossomed with delight.  Look at her now, man!  He don’t go near her.  He hasn’t had the decency to take her a walk, a drive, or anything, since we got here.  He began, from the moment we came, with that gang in town.  He was simply devoted to Miss Beaubien until Alice Renwick came; then he dropped her like a hot brick.  By the Eternal, Rollins, he hasn’t gotten off with that old love yet, you mark my words.  There’s Indian blood in her veins, and a look in her eye that makes me wriggle, sometimes.  I watched her last night at parade when she drove out here with that copper-faced old squaw, her mother.  For all her French and Italian education and her years in New York and Paris, that girl’s got a wild streak in her somewhere.  She sat there watching him as the officers marched to the front, and then her, as he went up and joined Miss Renwick; and there was a gleam of her white teeth and a flash in her black eyes that made me think of the leap of a knife from the sheath.  Not but what ’twould serve him right if she did play him some devil’s trick.  It’s his own doing.  Were any people out from town?” he suddenly asked.