“Enemy, ye gods!” roared Ranson.  “Why, if I were to see a Moro entering that door with a bolo in each fist I’d fall on his neck and kiss him.  I’m not trained to this garrison business.  You fellows are.  They took all the sporting blood out of you at West Point; one bad mark for smoking a cigarette, two bad marks for failing to salute the instructor in botany, and all the excitement you ever knew were charades and a cadet-hop a t Cullum Hall.  But, you see, before I went to the Philippines with Merritt, I’d been there twice on a fellow’s yacht, and we’d tucked the Spanish governor in his bed with his spurs on.  Now, I have to sit around and hear old Bolland tell how he put down a car-strike in St. Louis, and Stickney’s long-winded yarns of Table Mountain and the Bloody Angle.  He doesn’t know the Civil War’s over.  I tell you, if I can’t get excitement on tap I’ve got to make it, and if I make it out here they’ll court-martial me.  So there’s nothing for it but to resign.”

“You’d better wait till the end of the week,” said Crosby, grinning.  “It’s going to be full of gayety.  Thursday, paymaster’s coming out with our cash, and to-night that Miss Post from New York arrives in the up stage.  She’s to visit the colonel, so everybody will have to give her a good time.”

“Yes, I certainly must wait for that,” growled Ranson; “there probably will be progressive euchre parties all along the line, and we’ll sit up as late as ten o’clock and stick little gilt stars on ourselves.”

Crosby laughed tolerantly.

“I see your point of view,” he said.  “I remember when my father took me to Monte Carlo I saw you at the tables with enough money in front of you to start a bank.  I remember my father asked the croupiers why they allowed a child of your age to gamble.  I was just a kid then, and so were you, too.  I remember I thought you were the devil of a fellow.”

Ranson looked sheepishly at Miss Cahill and laughed.  “Well, so I was--then,” he said.  “Anybody would be a devil of a fellow who’d been brought up as I was, with a doting parent who owns a trust and doesn’t know the proper value of money.  And yet you expect me to be happy with a fifty-cent limit game, and twenty miles of burned prairie.  I tell you I’ve never been broken to it.  I don’t know what not having your own way means.  And discipline!  Why, every time I have to report one of my men to the colonel I send for him afterward and give him a drink and apologize to him.  I tell you the army doesn’t mean anything to me unless there’s something doing, and as there is no fighting out here I’m for the back room of the Holland House and a rubber-tired automobile.  Little old New York is good enough for me!”