Slowly and in silence the groups of spectators broke up and sauntered away as the last of the prisoners dragged back into the guard-house, and the guard itself broke ranks and went within doors, leaving only the sentry pacing mechanically the narrow, hard-beaten path, the sergeant, and at the turn of the road, the young lieutenant whom Captain Kress had addressed as Mr. Ray. This officer, having silently received his superior's orders and seen to it that Murray was actually "behind the bars," had again come forth into the gathering twilight, the gloaming of a cheerless day, and having hastened to the bend from which point the forms of the officer of the day and his associate were still faintly visible, stood gazing after them, a puzzled look in his brave young face. Not yet a month in possession of his commission, here was a lad to whom every iota of the routine of a lieutenant's life was as familiar as though he had drawn the pay for a decade. Born and bred in the army, taught from early boyhood to ride and shoot, to spar and swim, spending his vacation in saddle and his schooldays in unwilling study, an adept in every healthful and exhilarating sport, keen with rifle and revolver, with shotgun and rod, with bat and racquet, with the gloves and Indian clubs, the nimblest quarter-back and dodger, the swiftest runner of his school, it must be owned that Mr. Sanford Ray was a most indifferent scholar. Of geography, history, and languages he had rather more than a smattering because of occasional tours abroad when still at an impressionable age. Yet Sandy "took more stock," as he expressed it, and "stawk," as he called it, in Sioux and the sign language than he did in French or German, knew far more of the Rockies and Sierras than he did of the Alps, studied the European cavalry with the eye of an accomplished critic, and stoutly maintained that while they were bigger swells and prettier to look at, they could neither ride nor shoot to compare with the sturdy troopers of his father's squadron. "As to uniforms," said Sandy, "anybody could look swagger in the lancer and huzzar rig. It takes a man to look like a soldier in what our fellows have to wear." It wasn't the field garb Sandy despised, but the full dress, the blue and yellow enormity in which our troopers are compelled to appear. It had been the faint hope of his fond parents that Master Sandy would grow up to be something, by which was meant a lawyer, an artist, architect, engineer,--something in civil life that promised home and fortune. But the lad from babyhood would think of nothing but the army and with much misgiving, in Sandy's fifteenth year, his father shipped him to Kentucky, where they were less at home than in Kansas, and gave him a year's hard schooling in hopes of bracing up his mathematics.