Swinnerton could sing. He had an unusually facile and sympathetic baritone voice, which he accompanied well on a guitar, and it was part of his panacea to sing in Spanish, some queer, immemorial folk-lilts, passionate with the throbbing _tempo di bolero_, that sometimes ended with a plaintive little wail at the inconstancy of a _caballero_ lover, and sometimes with an impudent staccato note, like a Sevillan dancer’s final step in a whirling _jota_. It was perfectly possible to stand in the corridor and imagine the singer, who was inspired by a remembered face, to be the most gorgeous _Escamillo_ that ever stepped gracefully toward an alluring _Carmen_--until the door opened. For there would stand Swinnerton, his fat face red and wet from exertion, his hair awry, his round rabbit’s eyes inquiring, and his pudgy little body partly covered by a Japanese crape kimono, and this would bring a smile. It was this very sort of smile that Swinnerton had been pleased to see on the faces of people for thirty years, but that irked him sorely now. It meant that he was not taken seriously, and he shrank from offering to the pride of Mary Smith in him a thing so lightly held. He desired dignity; he yearned for it more passionately than he had ever longed for anything in his whole life before. It did not come, and nothing that he could do would bring it nearer. Swinnerton’s own smile became sad, and a little of this sadness seeped into his letters. Out of this grew something very like a misunderstanding, for it had been unconscious, and in far-away Fort Robertson Mary Smith sensed it and asked about it. It disappeared, but in its place came a strange, false little note of irrelevancy. There came to Swinnerton one day a vexed letter, and then for almost a week no letter at all. The fire of insurrection was lapping up toward the border, and at Cananea, fifty miles away, Lopez was concentrating his ragamuffin battalions with ugly menace toward Angeles. Disquieting rumors were current on the American side, and one day the colonel, with his staff, was called to Huachuca, which left only Fredericks and Swinnerton to open the official mail. There were two bills and a wedding-invitation in Swinnerton’s sack, and only the daily bulletin of conditions along the border generally for the commanding officer. Fredericks opened this, and Swinnerton, the bills placed in his pocket, the wedding-invitation still in his hand, read it over Fredericks’s shoulder. [Illustration: Color-Tone, engraved for ~The Century~ by H. Davidson “GAZING INTO HER TEAR-DIMMED EYES AND TELLING HER ... THAT THERE WAS NO DANGER” DRAWN BY H. T. DUNN] “Information from reports of secret agents of the State and Treasury departments indicate a movement of Lopez forces toward Quebrantos smelter, five miles west of Agua Caliente--” “Phew!” whistled Fredericks. “Getting warm. We’ll see a scrap yet, eh? Who’s getting married now, Swinney?”