The Desert and the Sown | Page 4

children went?" By the "children," as the colonel had noted, Mrs. Bogardus usually meant her daughter, the budding tyrant, Christine.
"Fine woman!" he mused, alone with himself in his study. "Splendid character head. Regular Dutch beauty. But hard--eh?--a trifle hard in the grain. Eyes that tell you nothing. Mouth set like a stone. Never rambles in her talk. Never speculates or exaggerates for fun. Never runs into hyperbole--the more fool some other folks! Speaks to the point or keeps still."

II
INTRODUCING A SON-IN-LAW
The colonel's papers failed to hold him somehow. He rose and paced the room with his short, stiff-kneed tread. He stopped and stared into the fire; his face began to get red.
"So! Moya's clothes are not good enough. Going to set the people to work, is she? Wants an outfit worthy of her son. And who's to pay for it, by gad? Post-nuptial bills for wedding finery are going to hurt poor little Moya like the deuce. Confound the woman! Dressing my daughter for me, right in my own house. Takes it in her hands as if it were her right, by ----!" The colonel let slip another expletive. "Well," he sighed, half amused at his own violence, "I'll write to Annie. I promised Moya, and it's high time I did."
Annie was the colonel's sister, the wife of an infantry captain, stationed at Fort Sherman. She was a very understanding woman; at least she understood her brother. But she was not solely dependent upon his laggard letters for information concerning his private affairs. The approaching wedding at Bisuka Barracks was the topic of most of the military families in the Department of the Columbia. Moya herself had written some time before, in the self-conscious manner of the newly engaged. Her aunt knew of course that Moya and Christine Bogardus had been room-mates at Miss Howard's, that the girls had fallen in love with each other first, and with visits at holidays and vacations, when the army girl could not go to her father, it was easily seen how the rest had followed. And well for Moya that it had, was Mrs. Creve's indorsement. As a family they were quite sufficiently represented in the army; and if one should ever get an Eastern detail it would be very pleasant to have a young niece charmingly settled in New York.
The colonel drew a match across the top bar of the grate and set it to his pipe. His big nostrils whitened as he took a deep in-breath. He reseated himself and began his duty letter in the tone of a judicious parent; but, warming as he wrote, under the influence of Annie's imagined sympathy, he presently broke forth with his usual arrogant colloquialism.
"She might have had her pick of the junior officers in both branches. And there was a captain of engineers at the Presidio, a widower, but an awfully good fellow. And she has chosen a boy, full of transcendental moonshine, who climbs upon a horse as if it were a stone fence, and has mixed ideas which side of himself to hang a pistol on.
"I have no particular quarrel with the lad, barring his great burly mouthful of a name, Bo--gardus! To call a child Moya and have her fetch up with her soft, Irish vowels against such a name as that! She had a fond idea that it was from Beauregard. But she has had to give that up. It's Dutch--Hudson River Dutch--for something horticultural--a tree, or an orchard, or a brush-pile; and she says it's a good name where it belongs. Pity it couldn't have stayed where it belongs.
"However, you won't find him quite so scrubby as he sounds. He's very proper and clean-shaven, with a good pair of dark, Dutch eyes, which he gets from his mother; and I wish he had got her business ability with them, and her horse sense, if the lady will excuse me. She runs the property and he spends it, as far as she'll let him, on the newest reforms. And there's another hitch!--To belong to the Truly Good at twenty-four! But beggars can't be choosers. He's going to settle something handsome on Moya out of the portion Madame gives him on his marriage. My poor little girl, as you know, will get nothing from me but a few old bits and trinkets and a father's blessing,--the same doesn't go for much in these days. I have been a better dispenser than accumulator, like others of our name.
"I do assure you, Annie, it bores me down to the ground, this humanitarian racket from children with ugly names who have just chipped the shell. This one owns his surprise that we work in the army! That our junior officers teach, and study a bit perforce themselves. His own idea is that every