that after marching all day?"

"I did not inquire, sir: he might have told me 'twas none of my
business, don't you know?" And Mr. Hayne has the insufferable hardihood
to wink at the battalion adjutant,--a youth of two years' longer service
than his own.

"Well, Mr. Hayne, this is no matter for levity," says Rayner, angrily.
"What does Captain Hull mean to do with his own men, if I'm to do the
guard?"

"That is another point, Captain Rayner, which I had not the requisite
effrontery to inquire into. Now, _you_ might ask him, but I couldn't,
don't you know?" responds Hayne, smiling amiably the while into the
wrathful face of his superior. It serves only to make the indignant
captain more wrathful; and no wonder. There has been no love lost
between the two since Hayne joined the Riflers early the previous year.
He came in from civil life, a city-bred boy, fresh from college, full of
spirits, pranks, fun of every kind; a wonderfully keen hand with the
billiard-cue; a knowing one at cards and such games of chance as college
boys excel at; a musician of no mean pretensions, and an irrepressible
leader in all the frolics and frivolities of his comrades. He had leaped
to popularity from the start. He was full of courtesy and gentleness to
women, and became a pet in social circles. He was frank, free,
off-handed with his associates, spending lavishly, "treating" with
boyish ostentation on all occasions, living quite _en grand seigneur_,
for he seemed to have a little money outside his pay,--"a windfall from
a good old duffer of an uncle," as he had explained it. His father, a
scholarly man who had been summoned to an important under-office in the
State Department during the War of the Rebellion, had lived out his