“Does you mean that?” anxiously asked Kettle.

“Don’t I?” responded Sergeant Halligan, confidently.  “Maybe you think it’s hard lines to have to drill all day and walk post all night, but it’s a merry jest compared with burning in hell fire.  I’d ruther drill and walk post all my life than find myself in the lake of brimstone and sulphur that’s a-waitin’ for cowards.”

“Tain’t the drill and the walkin’ post as skeers me,” said Kettle, “but I ain’t noways fond of guns.  If it wasn’t for them devilish guns I’d enlist, pertickler if they’d let me stay with Miss Betty and the baby.”

“Sure they would,” replied the artful Halligan with a wink.  “The Colonel wouldn’t disoblige his lady.  You’d be detailed to work around the house here, and you’d look grand in uniform.”

“You think so?” said Kettle, with a delighted grin, “I always did have a kinder honin’ after them yaller stripes down my legs.”

“And a sabre and a sabretache,” continued the Sergeant.  Times were sometimes dull at Fort Blizzard, and the men in the barracks could get a good many laughs out of Kettle as a soldier.

The yellow stripes down his legs and the sabre and sabretache were dazzling to Kettle, But an objection rose on the horizon.

“How ’bout them hosses?” he asked, “I ain’t never been on no hoss sence the time when I wuz a little shaver, and the Kun’l—­he wasn’t nothin’ but a lieutenant then—­wuz courtin’ Miss Betty, and he pick me up and put me on a hoss he call Birdseye.  Lord!  It makes me feel creepy now, to tink ’bout that hoss!”

“Oh, you needn’t bother about horses,” answered the Sergeant, cheerfully.  “The Colonel could manage that, and you can wear your uniform just the same.”

“I reckon I could ride a gentle hoss,” ventured Kettle.

“’Course,” replied the Sergeant confidently, “I think I can manage it with the orficer in charge of mounts.  I could get the milkman’s hoss for you.  She is twenty-three years old and as quiet as an old maid of seventy-five; she wouldn’t run away or kick, not even if you was to build a fire under her.”

This seemed to dispose of the great difficulty in Kettle’s mind, when the Sergeant suggested that he would see the milkman that very evening, and at nine o’clock the next morning, he would go to the officer in charge of mounts, and by ten o’clock Kettle, as soon as he had finished washing up the breakfast things and had taken the After-Clap for his airing in the baby carriage, could step down to the recruiting office and enlist.

Everything looked rosy to Kettle.  That night, at dinner, Kettle was radiant and informed Mrs. Fortescue, between the fish and the roast, that he had “done found his duty and was a-goin’ to do it.”

Mrs. Fortescue had some curiosity to know what this new duty of Kettle’s was, but Kettle maintained a mysterious silence, only admitting that it would not take him away from “Miss Betty and the baby.”