"Look at this," said Plume. "They raked it out of the sand close to
where Mullins was lying." And the major held forth an object that
gleamed in the last rays of the slanting sunshine. It was Blakely's
beautiful watch.
CHAPTER VII
"WOMAN-WALK-IN-THE-NIGHT"
The dawn of another cloudless day was breaking and the dim lights at
the guard-house and the hospital burned red and bleary across the
sandy level of the parade. The company cooks were already at their
ranges, and a musician of the guard had been sent to rouse his fellows
in the barracks, for the old-style reveille still held good at many a
post in Arizona, before the drum and fife were almost entirely
abandoned in favor of the harsher bugle, by the infantry of our
scattered little army. Plume loved tradition. At West Point, where he
had often visited in younger days, and at all the "old-time"
garrisons, the bang of the morning gun and the simultaneous crash of
the drums were the military means devised to stir the soldier from his
sleep. Then, his brief ablutions were conducted to the accompaniment
of the martial strains of the field musicians, alternating the sweet
airs of Moore and Burns, the lyrics of Ireland and Auld Reekie, with
quicksteps from popular Yankee melodies of the day, winding up with a
grand flourish at the foot of the flagstaff, to whose summit the flag
had started at the first alarum; then a rush into rattling "double
quick" that summoned the laggards to scurry into the silently forming
ranks, and finally, with one emphatic rataplan, the morning concert
abruptly closed and the gruff voices of the first sergeants, in
swift-running monotone, were heard calling the roll of their shadowy
companies, and, thoroughly roused, the garrison "broke ranks" for the
long routine of the day.
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