ONE:The night of their return to the post, Cairness, crossing the parade ground shortly before retreat, saw Felipa. He had been walking with his eyes on the earth, debating within himself the question of his future, whether he should re?nlist, succumb to the habit of the service, which is to ambition and endeavor what opium is to the system, or drop back into the yet more aimless life he had been leading five years before, when a fit of self-disgust had caused him to decide that he was good for nothing but a trooper, if even that.A raiding party of hostiles had passed near the fort, and had killed, with particular atrocity, a family of settlers. The man and his wife had been tortured to death, the baby had had its brains beaten out against the trunk of a tree, a very young child had been hung by the wrist tendons to two meat hooks on the walls of the ranch-house, and left there to die. One big boy had had his eyelids and lips and nose cut off, and had been staked down to the ground with his remains of a face lying over a red-ant hole. Only two had [Pg 196]managed to escape,—a child of ten, who had carried his tiny sister in his arms, twenty miles of ca?ons and hills, to the post.
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ONE:Ellton messed with them regularly, but he was not to go out, because he was acting adjutant. To his intense disgust and considerable mortification—for he was young and very enthusiastic and burdened with ideals—he was obliged to appear spick and span in irreproachable undress, beside his superiors in their campaign clothes.
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ONE:Then stand to your glasses steady,
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