As he spoke these fateful words of mutiny Lieutenant Ranson raised his black eyes and snatched a swift side-glance at the face of Mary Cahill.  It was almost as though it were from her he sought his answer.  He could not himself have told what it was he would have her say.  But ever since the idea of leaving the army had come to him, Mary Cahill and the army had become interchangeable and had grown to mean one and the same thing.  He fought against this condition of mind fiercely.  He had determined that without active service the army was intolerable; but that without Mary Cahill civil life would also prove intolerable, he assured himself did not at all follow.  He had laughed at the idea.  He had even argued it out sensibly.  Was it reasonable to suppose, he asked himself, that after circling the great globe three times he should find the one girl on it who alone could make him happy, sitting behind a post-trader’s counter on the open prairie?  His interest in Miss Cahill was the result of propinquity, that was all.  It was due to the fact that there was no one else at hand, because he was sorry for her loneliness, because her absurd social ostracism had touched his sympathy.  How long after he reached New York would he remember the little comrade with the brave, boyish eyes set in the delicate, feminine head, with its great waves of gorgeous hair?  It would not be long, he guessed.  He might remember the way she rode her pony, how she swung from her Mexican saddle and caught up a gauntlet from the ground.  Yes, he certainly would remember that, and he would remember the day he had galloped after her and ridden with her through the Indian village, and again that day when they rode to the water-fall and the Lover’s Leap.  And he would remember her face at night as it bent over the books he borrowed for her, which she read while they were at mess, sitting in her high chair with her chin resting in her palms, staring down at the book before her.  And the trick she had, whenever he spoke, of raising her head and looking into the fire, her eyes lighting and her lips smiling.  They would be pleasant memories, he was sure.  But once back again in the whirl and rush of the great world outside of Fort Crockett, even as memories they would pass away.

Mary Cahill made no outward answer to the rebellious utterance of Lieutenant Ranson.  She only bent her eyes on her book and tried to think what the post would hold for her when he had carried out his threat and betaken himself into the world and out of her life forever.  Night after night she had sat enthroned behind her barrier and listened to his talk, wondering deeply.  He had talked of a world she knew only in novels, in history, and in books of travel.  His view of it was not an educational one:  he was no philosopher, nor trained observer.  He remembered London—­to her the capital of the world—­ chiefly by its restaurants, Cairo on account of its execrable golf-links.  He lived only to enjoy himself.  His view was that