“I thank your honor; but Mabel is betrothed to another.”

“The devil she is!  That will produce a stir in the fort; though I’m not sorry to hear it either, for, to be frank with you, Sergeant, I’m no great admirer of unequal matches.”

“I think with your honor, and have no desire to see my daughter an officer’s lady.  If she can get as high as her mother was before her, it ought to satisfy any reasonable woman.”

“And may I ask, Sergeant, who is the lucky man that you intend to call son-in-law?”

“The Pathfinder, your honor.”

“Pathfinder!”

“The same, Major Duncan; and in naming him to you, I give you his whole history.  No one is better known on this frontier than my honest, brave, true-hearted friend.”

“All that is true enough; but is he, after all, the sort of person to make a girl of twenty happy?”

“Why not, your honor?  The man is at the head of his calling.  There is no other guide or scout connected with the army who has half the reputation of Pathfinder, or who deserves to have it half as well.”

“Very true, Sergeant; but is the reputation of a scout exactly the sort of renown to captivate a girl’s fancy?”

“Talking of girls’ fancies, sir, is in my humble opinion much like talking of a recruit’s judgment.  If we were to take the movements of the awkward squad, sir, as a guide, we should never form a decent line in battalion, Major Duncan.”

“But your daughter has nothing awkward about her:  for a genteeler girl of her class could not be found in old Albion itself.  Is she of your way of thinking in this matter? —­ though I suppose she must be, as you say she is betrothed.”

“We have not yet conversed on the subject, your honor; but I consider her mind as good as made up, from several little circumstances which might be named.”

“And what are these circumstances, Sergeant?” asked the Major, who began to take more interest than he had at first felt on the subject.  “I confess a little curiosity to know something about a woman’s mind, being, as you know, a bachelor myself.”

“Why, your honor, when I speak of the Pathfinder to the girl, she always looks me full in the face; chimes in with everything I say in his favor, and has a frank open way with her, which says as much as if she half considered him already as a husband.”

“Hum! and these signs, you think, Dunham, are faithful tokens of your daughter’s feelings?”

“I do, your honor, for they strike me as natural.  When I find a man, sir, who looks me full in the face, while he praises an officer, —­ for, begging your honor’s pardon, the men will sometimes pass their strictures on their betters, — and when I find a man looking me in the eyes as he praises his captain, I always set it down that the fellow is honest, and means what he says.”

“Is there not some material difference in the age of the intended bridegroom and that of his pretty bride, Sergeant?”