Then he was helpful about the offices in garrison, wrote a neat hand, was often pressed into service to aid with the quartermaster or commissary papers, and had been offered permanent daily duty as company clerk, but begged off, saying he loved a horse and cavalry work too well to be mured in an office.  He was silence and reticence itself on matters affecting other people, but the soul of frankness, apparently, where he was personally concerned.  Anybody was welcome to know his past, he said.  He was raised in Texas; had lived for years on the frontier; had been through Arizona with a bull-team in the 50’s, and had ’listed under the banner of the Lone Star when Texas went the way of all the sisterhood of Southern (not border) States, and then, being stranded after the war, had “bullwhacked” again through New Mexico; had drifted again across the Mimbres and down to the old Spanish-Mexican town of Tucson; had tried prospecting, mail-riding, buck-board driving, gambling; had been one of the sheriff’s posse that cleaned out Sonora Bill’s little band of thugs and cut-throats, and had expressed entire willingness to officiate as that lively outlaw’s executioner in case of his capture.  He had twice been robbed while driving the stage across the divide and had been left for dead in the Maricopa range, an episode which he said was the primal cause of his dissipations later.  Finally, after a summary discharge he had come to the adjutant at Camp Lowell, presented two or three certificates of good character and bravery in the field from officers who bore famous names in the Southern army, and the regimental recruiting officer thought he could put up with an occasional drunk in a man who promised to make as good a trooper under the stars and stripes as he had made under the stars and bars.  And so he was enlisted, and, to the surprise of everybody, hadn’t taken a drop since.

Now this, said the rank and file, was proof positive of something radically wrong, either in his disposition or his record.  It was entirely comprehensible and fully in accordance with human nature and the merits of the case that a man should quit drinking when he quit the army, but that a man with the blot of an occasional spree on his escutcheon should enlist for any other cause than sheer desperation, and should then become a teetotaler, was nothing short of prima facie evidence of moral depravity.

“There’s something behind it all, fellers,” said Corporal Murphy, “and I mean to keep an eye on him from this out.  If he don’t dhrink next pay-day, look out for him.  He’s a professional gambler laying for your hard-earned greenbacks.”