Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in. Two days after the receipt ths announcement of Fanny Hay ward's cngaa2ment to Mr. McLane and a few weeks before the marriage, Randolph Merriam had left Fort Sedgwick in command of a detachment of cavalry escorting a government survey to the Mescalero Range. It was not his tour. The detail belonged to Harrison, a younger officer, who had been saving up ail winter for a two months' leave and a cnance to spend his savings at the great Exposition at Chicago. A relentless colonel would allow him no leave, because it was his turn for field duty, and because so many officers wished to go to the Fair that it was out of the question to expect any one to offer to take the detail for him. The detachment would be in the field at least three months, possibly four. Harrison, consequently, was the bluest man at Sedgwick, and said more hard things about government surveys, and more improperthings, than could well be recorded here. Everybody had been congratulating Merriam on the final receipt of what the lawyers didn't " scoop" of his little legacy, and for two weeks he had been as happy as Harrison was miserable. Then, to the utter amaze of everybody, just the day before it was time for the command to start, it was announced that Harrison's application for leave had gone forward approved, and that Merriam had asked for and been granted the luxury of a three or four months' jog through the roughest and most forbidding of mountain ranges. He had even got the colonel's permission to go ahead and wait for the detachment at the old Mi ssion on the Santa Clara, and had started late at night, accompanied only by an orderly. People couldn't believe their ears, and the post commander rejoiced in the possession of a secret even his wife couldn't coax out of him—the conscienceless, crabbed ...