The round-faced good humor of fat, bandy-legged Swinnerton was proverbial. He was not a cavalry officer. He was a medico, and the best surgeon in the service; yet the only place where his mere passing did not provoke a smile was the operating-pavilion of his own hospital. His thin tow hair was of the unbrushable variety. Smooth and wet it as he would, it stuck out at divers angles in every conceivable form of horn and quirk and curl from a head that was of the contour of a peeled onion. His blue eyes were round, his lips seemed pursed in a perennial effort to form the letter o, and his torso was nearly spherical, with all of which grotesquery no one in the world seemed more pleased than Swinnerton himself. For with the advantage of having his laugh well launched before he had uttered a word, he had acquired an easy reputation as one of the army’s “funny men,” a thing in which he took no little pride, until between the dawn and the dark of a single day it became for him a shirt of fire which, strive as he would, he could not cast away, and which came as near as the breadth of a man’s hand from being the end of him. Apart from these the Sixteenth is a “married” regiment, and when orders dropped from a seemingly placid sky, sending the command to the Mexican border, fifteen hundred miles away, with two hours’ notice, no one took thought of how this might affect the officers of the bachelors’ mess, and least of all Swinnerton. At the railroad spur, where three long troop-trains lay puffing amid a debris of ammunition- and ration-cases, forage-bales, saddles, and equipment; where a regiment of soldiers swarmed, tugging and heaving supplies upon the train, leading, cajoling, and forcing frightened troop-horses up the heavy ramps to the crowded stock-cars; where sergeants swore and fretted, and orderlies ran about with belated orders for the officers who were devoting the between-times of all this to saying good-by to more or less numerous families, no one had eyes for Swinnerton. And eyes that might have seen him would not have been believed. For, fancying himself hidden behind a pile of canvas-bales of medical supplies, he was holding the two hands of a gravely beautiful girl, gazing into her tear-dimmed eyes and telling her in a hoarse and earnest voice that there was no danger, anyway, that all this could not possibly mean war, and that if it did, he, as a non-combatant, would keep well to the rear and safely out of harm’s way; that partings made no difference, anyway, so long as he loved her and she loved him, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.