without the environs of Carson City. Twenty minutes later he was riding
swiftly into the northwest, bearing important news to General Sheridan,
commander of the Department, who happened at that moment to be at Fort
Cairnes. To Keith this had been merely another page in a career of
adventure; for him to take his life in his hands had long ago become an
old story. He had quietly performed the special duty allotted him, watched
a squadron of troopers trot forth down the valley of the Republican,
received the hasty thanks of the peppery little general, and then, having
nothing better to do, traded his horse in at the government corral for a
fresh mount and started back again for Carson City. For the greater
portion of two nights and a day he had been in the saddle, but he was
accustomed to this, for he had driven more than one bunch of longhorns up
the Texas trail; and as he had slept three hours at Cairnes, and as his
nerves were like steel, the thought of danger gave him slight concern. He
was thoroughly tired, and it rested him to get out of the saddle, while
the freshness of the morning air was a tonic, the very breath of which
made him forgetful of fatigue.

After all, this was indeed the very sort of experience which appealed to
him, and always had--this life of peril in the open, under the stars and
the sky. He had constantly experienced it for so long now, eight years, as
to make it seem merely natural. While he ploughed steadily forward through
the shifting sand of the coulee, his thought drifted idly back over those
years, and sometimes he smiled, and occasionally frowned, as various
incidents returned to memory. It had been a rough life, yet one not
unusual to those of his generation. Born of excellent family in tidewater
Virginia, his father a successful planter, his mother had died while he
was still in early boyhood, and he had grown up cut off from all womanly
influence. He had barely attained his majority, a senior at William and
Mary's College, when the Civil War came; and one month after Virginia cast