This was the climax of Henniker's flirtations: all that went before had been as nothing, all that came after was not much worse than nothing. It was the one sincere as it was the one poetic passion of his life; and had it not cost him his self-respect through his baseness to Callie, and the treachery and dissimulation he was teaching to an innocent child, it might have made him a faithful man. As it was, his soldier's honor slept; it was the undisciplined part of him that spoke to the elemental nature of the girl; and it was fit that a trumpet's reckless summons, or its brief inarticulate call, like the note of a wild bird to its mate, should be the language of his love. * * * * * Retreat had sounded, one evening in October, but it made no stir any more in the cottage where the girls had been so gay. Callie, putting the tea on the table, remembered, as she heard the gun fire, how in the the spring Henniker had said that when "sound off" was at six he would drop in to supper some night, and show her how to make _chili con carne_, a dish that every soldier knows who has served on the Mexican border. Her face grew hard, for these foolish, unsleeping reminders were as constant as the bugle calls. The women waited for the head of the house; but as he did not come, they sat down and ate quickly, saving the best dish hot for him. They had finished, and the room was growing dusk, when he came in breezily, and called at once, as a man will, for a light. Meta rose to fetch it. The door stood open between the fore-room and the kitchen, where she was groping for a lamp. Mr. Meadows spoke in a voice too big for the room. He had just been conversing across the common with the quartermaster-sergeant, as the two men's footsteps diverged by separate paths to their homes. "I hear there's going to be a change at the post;" he shouted. "The --th is going to leave this department, and C troop of the Second is coming from Custer. Sergeant says they are looking for orders any day now." Mrs. Meadows, before she thought, glanced at Callie. The girl winced, for she hated to be looked at like that. She held up her head and began to sing audaciously, drumming with her fingers on the table:-- "'When my mother comes to know That I love the soldiers so, She will lock me up all day, Till the soldiers march away.'" "What sort of a song is that?" asked her father sharply. Callie looked him in the eyes. "Don't you know that tune?" said she. "Henniker plays that at guard-mount; and sometimes he plays this:-- 'Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad, Though father and mither and a' should go mad.'" "Let him play what he likes," said the father angrily. "His saucy jig tunes are nothing to us. I'm thankful no girl of mine is following after the army. It's a hard life for a woman, I can tell you, in the ranks." Callie pushed her chair back, and looked out of the window as if she had not heard.