"Fall out, sir; Mr. Connell takes command."
"If that wasn't a low-down trick to play on Coyote, I never heard of one," said Harry Winn that night at supper. "Old Scad never evolved a harder test. Think of parading a fellow's mother at the saluting point when he hadn't seen her for a whole year, just to prove that he's such a soldier he couldn't forget himself even then."
There were lots of boys in gray who believed the whole thing was a "put-up job" to settle a bet among the officers, but they couldn't prove it.
Over the details of that meeting we need not linger. Ordered to assume the duties of surgeon at West Point, Dr. Graham was urged by McCrea and others to give Geordie no warning, but keep it all as a delightful surprise. Neither he nor his gentle wife, however, ever dreamed of its being carried to the point it was. That night when Grant Hall was crowded, and pretty girls in the daintiest of gowns were dancing with cavaliers in gray and white, in blue and gold, or conventional black, when music and merry laughter and glad voices all conspired to banish care, there was one couple in whose faces—one so sweet, so tender, so full of pride in the stalwart son on whose arm she leaned—there shone a radiance that challenged and then was reflected in every eye.
"She makes me think of Ailie in 'Rab and his Friends,'" said Lieutenant Allen, as he and a group of his fellows stood watching them slowly circling the room.
Man after man of Geordie's class came up to be presented by her big boy, whose cup seemed fairly overflowing. While Bud, painfully conscious of the rapidly liquefying state of his first pair of kids, followed his brother with adoration in his eyes, and Mrs. Frazier, still in deep mourning, could not deny herself the delight of peeping in from the arched entrance, where she and Benny stood for half an hour, "just to see how happy Mrs. Graham looked."
Bless the mother heart! How much joy there was for her after the long exile of the frontier and the three years' separation from her first-born. Speedily they were settled in their new home overlooking the bright blue ribbon of the Hudson, winding down between its bold and beautiful shores. From her windows she could see the front of the gray mess-hall, and day after day hear the tramp of the battalion as it came marching down and Geordie's deep voice ringing out the words of command. She used to drop her needle-work and bustle Buddie, all too willing, from his lessons, and trip away to the Cavalry Plain to watch the evolutions at squadron drill and see her boy—no finer horseman among them all—swinging his sabre at the head of the first platoon, or in the wintry days that speedily set in, slashing at the heads in the riding-hall, and with his nimble fellows wrestling, vaulting, leaping high hurdles, and easily accomplishing feats, bare-back or in saddle, that made her often shudder and turn her eyes away. She loved to stroll out under the arching elms to meet him for a few brief minutes between evening drill and parade, and then watch him and Connell putting their splendidly-drilled companies through all manner of evolutions, as they marched them out to the spirited music of the band. She soon learned the ways of the corps, and loved to have a whole squad of the seniors down to tea each Saturday evening, and was sure to secure the presence of such young damsels as lingered about the Point, so as to make it interesting and joyous for his comrades. Perhaps she would have been less venturesome had she been less sure of Pops, but the class declared, "Coyote is spooney over his mother and nobody else." She had dreaded the day that was to take him from her arms to the Point. Now it seemed as though all too soon the day was coming that would take him from the Point, and from her, back to the far frontier he loved so well. The winter fairly flew away. The spring-tide came, and she almost wept the day the ice-gorge went whirling down the Hudson and the whole corps cheered it from the banks above. And the thunder of the guns at the April drills, the volleying of the skirmish-lines in May, were sounds that brought distress to her fond heart, for they told of still another week or month passed by, and only a little space reserved in which, every blessed sun, she could have her big boy at her side.