His uniform was entirely different from the regulation--he wore a blue forage cap with short, heavy visor of unpolished leather shadowing the bridge of his nose; his dark blue jacket was shell-cut; over it he wore a slashed dolman trimmed at throat, wrists and edges with fur; his breeches were buff; his boots finished at the top with a yellow cord forming a heart-shaped knot in front; at his heels trailed the most dainty and rakish of sabres, light, graceful, curved almost like a scimiter. All this is what the Special Messenger saw as she entered, instantly recognizing a regimental uniform which she had never seen but once before in her brief life. And straight through her heart struck a pain swift as a dagger thrust, and her hand in its buckskin gauntlet fell limply from the peak of her visor, and the color died in her cheeks. What the colonel of the Fourth Missouri saw before him was a lad, slim, rather pale, dark-eyed, swathed to the chin in the folds of a wet poncho; and he said, examining her musingly and stroking the ends of his curt mustache upward: "I understood from General Sheridan that the Special Messenger was to report to me. Where is she?" The lightning pain of the shock when she recognized the uniform interfered with breath and speech; confused, she raised her gloved hand and laid it unconsciously over her heart; and the colonel of the Fourth Missouri waited. "I am the Special Messenger," she said faintly. For a moment he scarcely understood that this slender young fellow, with dark hair as closely clipped and as curly as his own, could be a woman. Stern surprise hardened his narrowing gaze; he stood silent, handsome head high, looking down at her; then slowly the latent humor flickered along the edges of lip and lid, curbed instantly as he bowed, faultless, handsome--only the persistently upturned mustache impairing the perfectly detached and impersonal decorum with a warning of the _beau sabreur_ behind it all. "Will you be seated, madam?" "Thank you." She sat down; the wet poncho was hot and she shifted it, throwing one end across her shoulder. In her uniform she appeared willowy and slim, built like a boy, and with nothing of that graceful awkwardness which almost inevitably betrays such masqueraders. For her limbs were straight at the knees and faultlessly coupled, and there seemed to be the adolescent's smooth lack of development in the scarcely accented hips--only a straightly flowing harmony of proportion--a lad's grace muscularly undeveloped. Two leather straps crossed her breast, one weighted with field glasses, the other with a pouch. From the latter she drew her credentials and would have risen to present them, but the colonel of the Fourth Missouri detained her with a gesture, himself rose, and took the papers from her hand. While he sat reading, she, hands clasped in her lap, gazed at his well-remembered uniform, busy with her memories once more, and the sweetness of them--and the pain.