But she had borne too much, and the blow came all too soon,—­too heavy.  She was wellnigh senseless when the Beaubien carriage came whirling into the fort and old Maman rushed forth in voluble and rabid charge upon her daughter.  All too late! it was useless now.  Her darling’s heart was weaned away, and her love lavished on that tall, objectionable young soldier so soon to go forth to battle.  Reproaches, tears, wrath, were all in order, but were abandoned at sight of poor Nina’s agony of grief.  Noon came, and the train, and with buoyant tread the gallant command marched down the winding road and filed aboard the cars, and Howard Jerrold, shame-stricken, humbled at the contemplation of his own unworthiness, slowly unclasped her arms from about his neck, laid one long kiss upon her white and quivering lips, took one brief look in the great, dark, haunting, despairing eyes, and carried her wail of anguish ringing in his ears as he sprang aboard and was whirled away.

But there were women who deemed themselves worse off than Nina Beaubien,—­the wives and daughters and sweethearts whom she met that morn in town; for when they got back to Sibley the regiment was miles away.  For them there was not even a kiss from the lips of those they loved.  Time and train waited for no woman.  There were comrades battling for life in the Colorado Rockies, and aid could not come too soon.

XVII.

Under the cloudless heavens, under the starlit skies, blessing the grateful dew that cools the upland air and moistens the bunch-grass that has been bleaching all day in the fierce rays of the summer sun, a little column of infantry is swinging steadily southward.  Long and toilsome has been the march; hot, dusty, and parching the day.  Halts have been few and far between, and every man, from the colonel down, is coated with a gray mask of powdered alkali, the contribution of a two hours’ tramp through Deadman’s Canon just before the sun went down.  Now, however, they are climbing the range.  The morrow will bring them to the broad and beautiful valley of the Spirit Wolf, and there they must have news.  Officers and men are footsore and weary, but no one begs for rest.  Colonel Maynard, riding ahead on a sorry hack he picked up at the station two days’ long march behind them, is eager to reach the springs at Forest Glade before ordering bivouac for the night.  A week agone no one who saw him at Sablon would have thought the colonel fit for a march like this; but he seems rejuvenate.  His head is high, his eye as bright, his bearing as full of spirit, as man’s could possibly be at sixty, and the whole regiment cheered him when he caught the column at Omaha.  A talk with Chester and Armitage seemed to have made a new man of him, and to-night he is full of an energy that inspires the entire command.  Though they were farther away than many other troops ordered to the scene, the fact that their station was on the