There were two other watchers besides the Colonel.  These two stood at the drawing-room window.  One was tall and black and kind-eyed, with the unquenchable kindness of the colored race.  His official name was Solomon Ezekiel Pickup, but ever since Mrs. Fortescue, as Betty Beverley, had taken him, a little waif, forlorn and homeless and friendless, he had been simply Kettle, being as black as a kettle.  He had watched and adored the baby days of “Marse Beverley,” the straight young stripling now training to be a soldier at West Point, and Anita, the violet-eyed daughter, the adored of her father’s heart, but Kettle had not come into his own until the two-year-old baby, John Hope Fortescue II, had arrived in a world which did not expect him, but welcomed him the more rapturously on that account.  The new baby had taken everybody by surprise, and immediately acquired the name of the After-Clap.  He coolly approved of his father and mother, and thought Anita an entertaining person when she got down on the floor to play with him.  Naturally he was indifferent to his twenty-year-old brother, whom he had never seen, but Kettle—­his own Kettle—­was the beloved of the After-Clap’s heart.  Next to Kettle in his affections was Mrs. McGillicuddy, the six-foot-two wife of Sergeant McGillicuddy, who had eight children, of assorted sizes, and still found time to do a great deal for the After-Clap.

Mrs. Fortescue, riding briskly across the plaza, and seeing Kettle, so black, holding in his arms the laughing baby, so white, smiled and waved her hand at them.  Then, catching sight of the Commanding Officer, standing at the window of his office, she smiled at him.  But Colonel Fortescue was not smiling; on the contrary, he was frowning as his eyes fell upon Mrs. Fortescue’s mount, Birdseye, a light built black mare, with a shifty eye and a propensity to make free with her hind feet.  More than once Colonel Fortescue had reminded Mrs. Fortescue that it was somewhat beneath the dignity of a Commanding Officer’s wife to ride a kicking horse.  But Mrs. Fortescue had a sneaking affection for Birdseye and much preferred her to Pretty Maid, the brown mare Anita rode, and who was considered as demure as Anita, and Anita was very demure, and very, very pretty.  At least, so thought Lieutenant Victor Broussard, watching her out of the tail of his eye, as he passed some distance away.  It was not so far away, however, that Anita could not see the handsome turn of his close-cropped black head, and his eyes full of laughter and courage and impudence.  As some things go by contraries, the glimpse of Broussard made Anita dismount quickly from Pretty Maid and flit within doors to avoid the sight of him.  Once indoors, Anita ran where she could catch a last look of Broussard’s young figure, his cavalry cape thrown back, before he turned the corner and was gone.

Colonel Fortescue, at the office window, returned a salute, without a smile, to Mrs. Fortescue’s greeting from afar.  His teeth came together with a snap.