One reason why they met so seldom in garrison was that her father did
not like him in the least. The captain was a veteran soldier,
self-taught and widely honored, risen from the ranks. The lieutenant
was a man of gentle breeding and of college education, a soldier by
choice, or caprice, yet quite able at any time to quit the service and
live a life of ease, for he had, they said, abundant means of his own.
He had been first lieutenant of that troop at least five years, not
five months of which had he served on duty with it. First one general,
then another, had needed him as aide-de-camp, and when, on his own
application, he had been relieved from staff duty to enable him to
accompany his regiment to this then distant and inhospitable land, he
had little more than reached Camp Sandy when he was sent by the
department commander to investigate some irregularity at the Apache
reservation up the valley, and then, all unsoliciting, he had been
placed in charge pending the coming of a new agent to replace the
impeached one going home under guard, and the captain said things
about his subaltern's always seeking "fancy duty" that were natural,
yet unjust--things that reached Mr. Blakely in exaggerated form, and
that angered him against his senior to the extent of open rupture.
Then Blakely took the mountain fever at the agency, thereby still
further delaying his return to troop duty, and then began another
complication, for the contract doctor, though skillful in his
treatment, was less assiduous in nursing than were the wife of the
newly arrived agent and her young companion Lola, daughter of the
agency interpreter and his Apache-Yuma wife.
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