"Well, here's your chance, young man," said the bluff salt, unconscious of giving offense. "No time like a voyage for love making, once the girl gets her sea legs on. You ought to capture one of 'em before we're halfway to the Golden Gate. They rate 'em at two hundred thousand apiece. Don't know how long it takes a soldier to win a prize like that, but give a sailor such a show and she'd strike her colors before we sight St. Lucas. If you don't care for ducats and only want beauty, there's that little cousin. She can sing and play your soul away; give her half a chance and a good guitar." "Who's she?" queried Turnbull, balancing his half-smoked cigar between the fingers, as he blew a fragrant cloud to the cloudless vault above. "Didn't get the family name--Pancha they called her, a slip of a sixteen-year-old, going to school, perhaps." And the captain turned away to answer a question from his steward, leaving the two soldiers looking intently at each other, with new interest in their eyes. "Blake's destroyer was a sixteen-year-old Pancha, wasn't she?" asked the colonel in low tone. He had no mercy whatever on Blake, and was outspoken in condemnation of what he called his idiocy. Loring was silent a moment, then he drew a letter from an inner pocket. It had come with Turnbull--the last news from Arizona. "Read that when you've time, colonel," said he. "Perhaps had you been in Blake's place at his age you'd have forgotten everything but the stage and the fight. I think I should." And as this was the longest speech Turnbull had ever heard from Loring's lips, except his arraignment of Nevins before the court, the colonel pondered over it not a little. He took the letter and read it when, an hour later, the Idaho was plowing her lazy way southward through a dull and leaden sea. "I'm not the first man to be fooled by a slip of a girl, Loring," wrote Blake. "It isn't the first time that a woman has got the better of me, and it may not be the last. But the chagrin and misery I feel is not because I have suffered so much, but because you have, and all through my fault. I suppose you know the general has ordered me relieved and sent back to my company as no longer worthy to be called a cavalryman. All the same, one of these days I mean to get a transfer. My legs are too long for the doughboys anyhow. Meantime, with all meekness I'll bear my burden--I deserve it; but you'll believe me when I say it isn't the punishment, the humiliation this has cost me that so weighs upon me now; it is the thought of your loss and your prostration. One of these days I may find means to show you how much I feel it. Just now I have only a hint. Last year at this time my most cherished possession was my new spring style, ten-dollar Amidon. A silk hat is as out of place in Arizona as a sunshade in Sitka, yet my striker has just unpacked it and asked, with a grin on his confounded mug, 'What'll I be doin' wid this, sor?'"