were from the dreadful hencoop life they had led for so many
days--patient beyond words. He had risen early that morning. The rose
light over the eastern water was whitening, and all over the deck his
comrades lay asleep, their faces gray in the coming dawn and their
attitudes suggesting ghastly premonitions--premonitions that would come
true fast enough for some of the poor fellows--perhaps for him. Stepping
between and over the prostrate bodies, he made his way forward and
leaned over the prow, with his hat in his hand and his hair blowing back
from his forehead.

Already his face had suffered a change. For more than three long weeks
he had been merely a plain man among plain men. At once when he became
Private Crittenden, No. 63, Company C, --th United States Regular
Cavalry, at Tampa, he was shorn of his former estate as completely as
though in the process he had been wholly merged into some other man. The
officers, at whose table he had once sat, answered his salute precisely
as they answered any soldier's. He had seen Rivers but seldom--but once
only on the old footing, and that was on the night he went on board,
when Rivers came to tell him good-by and to bitterly bemoan the luck
that, as was his fear from the beginning, had put him among the
ill-starred ones chosen to stay behind at Tampa and take care of the
horses; as hostlers, he said, with deep disgust, adding hungrily:

"I wish I were in your place."

With the men, Crittenden was popular, for he did his work thoroughly,
asked no favors, shirked no duties. There were several officers' sons
among them working for commissions, and, naturally, he drifted to them,
and he found them all good fellows. Of Blackford, he was rather wary,
after Rivers's short history of him, but as he was friendly, unselfish,