that he should ask for duty in the land of deserts, centipedes, rattlesnakes, and Apaches. He put it on the ground of serious bronchial trouble which could be cured only in a dry climate, but the war office knew as well as the navy department that it was an affair of the heart and not of the throat. He wasn't the first man, by any manner of means, to fall in love with Madeleine Torrance, the prettiest girl and most unprincipled flirt that ever wore the navy button or tormented a sailor father. Blake sought the roughest duty--that of escorting inspectors, staff officers or paymasters on their wearisome trips through the wilderness--and no one denied him. The cavalry was short of officers and he got assigned to Sanford's troop, and the biggest surprise that had come since his commission met him one day at Gila Bend, when that same old red stage, a relic of California days, emerged from the dust-cloud of its own manufacture, and a quiet youth in pepper-and-salt and sand-colored costume, looked up from behind a pair of green goggles saying: "Hullo, Blake!" It was the voice, not the face, that the tall trooper recognized. "Well--of--all--the--Why, what in the name of Pegasus brings you here, Loring? I thought you had graduated into the engineers." "Fact," said the newcomer sententiously. "Well, what's an engineer doing in Arizona? I'd as soon look to see an archbishop." "Scouting," said the dust-colored man. "Where's dinner?" "In the shack yonder, if your stomach's copper-lined. Better come over to my camp and take pot-luck there." Which Loring gladly did, and then went on his dusty way, leaving Blake with something to think of beside his own woes. Within half a year of his graduation from West Point the young engineer, one of the stars of his class, had been ordered to report to the general commanding the Division of the Pacific and was set to work on a military map in that general's office. Loring found all maps of Arizona to be vague and incomplete, and was ordered forthwith to go to the territory and gather in the needed data. That he, too, should be lass-lorn never for a moment occurred to his comrade of the line. Had such facts been confessed among the exiles of those days many a comradeship of the far frontier would have been strengthened. That the girl who duped Gerald Blake should have been known to her who had captivated Mr. Loring was suspected by neither officer at the time, and that, despite the efforts and the resolution of both men, both women were destined to reappear upon the stage, and temporarily, at least, reassume their sway, was something neither soldier would have admitted possible. Yet stranger things had happened, and stranger still were destined to happen, and the first step in the drama was taken within the fortnight of this chance meeting at Gila Bend.