“Yes, half a dozen or so,” answered Mr. Rollins, who was pulling off his boots and inserting his feet into easy slippers, while old “Crusty” tramped excitedly up and down the floor.  “Most of them stayed out here, I think.  Only one team went back across the bridge.”

“Whose was that?”

“The Suttons’, I believe.  Young Cub Sutton was out with his sister and another girl.”

“There’s another damned fool!” growled Chester.  “That boy has ten thousand a year of his own, a beautiful home that will be his, a doting mother and sister, and everything wealth can buy, and yet, by gad! he’s unhappy because he can’t be a poor devil of a lieutenant, with nothing but drills, debts, and rifle-practice to enliven him.  That’s what brings him out here all the time.  He’d swap places with you in a minute.  Isn’t he very thick with Jerrold?”

“Oh, yes, rather.  Jerrold entertains him a good deal.”

“Which is returned with compound interest, I’ll bet you.  Mr. Jerrold simply makes a convenience of him.  He won’t make love to his sister, because the poor, rich, unsophisticated girl is as ugly as she is ubiquitous.  His majesty is fastidious, you see, and seeks only the caress of beauty, and while he lives there at the Suttons’ when he goes to town, and dines and sleeps and smokes and wines there, and uses their box at the opera-house, and is courted and flattered by the old lady because dear Cubby worships the ground he walks on and poor Fanny Sutton thinks him adorable, he turns his back on the girl at every dance because she can’t dance, and leaves her to you fellows who have a conscience and some idea of decency.  He gives all his devotions to Nina Beaubien, who dances like a coryphee, and drops her when Alice Renwick comes with her glowing Spanish beauty.  Oh, damn it, I’m an old fool to get worked up over it as I do, but you young fellows don’t see what I see.  You haven’t seen what I’ve seen; and pray God you never may!  That’s where the shoe pinches, Rollins.  It is what he reminds me of—­not so much what he is, I suppose—­that I get rabid about.  He is for all the world like a man we had in the old regiment when you were in swaddling-clothes; and I never look at Mamie Gray’s sad, white face that it doesn’t bring back a girl I knew just then whose heart was broken by just such a shallow, selfish, adorable scoun—­No, I won’t use that word in speaking of Jerrold; but it’s what I fear.  Rollins, you call him generous.  Well, so he is,—­lavish, if you like, with his money and his hospitality here in the post.  Money comes easily to him, and goes; but you boys misuse the term. I call him selfish to the core, because he can deny himself no luxury, no pleasure, though it may wring a woman’s life—­or, more than that, her honor—­to give it him.”  The captain was tramping up and down the room now, as was his wont when excited; his face was flushed, and his hand clinched.  He turned suddenly and faced the younger officer, who sat gazing uncomfortably at the rug in front of the fireplace.