"I see your point of view," he said. "I remember when my father took
me to Monte Carlo I saw you at the tables with enough money in front
of you to start a bank. I remember my father asked the croupiers why
they allowed a child of your age to gamble. I was just a kid then,
and so were you, too. I remember I thought you were the devil of a
fellow."

Ranson looked sheepishly at Miss Cahill and laughed. "Well, so I was-
-then," he said. "Anybody would be a devil of a fellow who'd been
brought up as I was, with a doting parent who owns a trust and
doesn't know the proper value of money. And yet you expect me to be
happy with a fifty-cent limit game, and twenty miles of burned
prairie. I tell you I've never been broken to it. I don't know what
not having your own way means. And discipline! Why, every time I have
to report one of my men to the colonel I send for him afterward and
give him a drink and apologize to him. I tell you the army doesn't
mean anything to me unless there's something doing, and as there is
no fighting out here I'm for the back room of the Holland House and a
rubber-tired automobile. Little old New York is good enough for me!"

As he spoke these fateful words of mutiny Lieutenant Ranson raised
his black eyes and snatched a swift side-glance at the face of Mary
Cahill. It was almost as though it were from her he sought his
answer. He could not himself have told what it was he would have her
say. But ever since the idea of leaving the army had come to him,
Mary Cahill and the army had become interchangeable and had grown to
mean one and the same thing. He fought against this condition of mind
fiercely. He had determined that without active service the army was
intolerable; but that without Mary Cahill civil life would also prove