Under Fire

Under Fire, by Charles King

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Fire, by Charles King This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Under Fire
Author: Charles King
Illustrator: C. B. Cox
Release Date: December 14, 2006 [EBook #20101]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER FIRE ***

Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

[Illustration: RED DOG'S ARREST.
Frontispiece. Page 264.]

UNDER FIRE.
BY
CAPT. CHARLES KING, U.S.A.,
AUTHOR OF "THE COLONEL'S DAUGHTER," "MARION'S FAITH," "CAPTAIN BLAKE," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY C. B. COX.
"A bad dhrill, a wake voice, an' a limp leg--thim three things are the signs av a bad man."--PRIVATE MULVANEY.
PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 1895.
COPYRIGHT, 1894, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.
TO
GENERAL WESLEY MERRITT, U.S. ARMY,
OUR HONORED COLONEL IN THE OLD DAYS AND A VALUED
FRIEND THROUGH ALL THESE LATER
YEARS, THIS STORY
IS
Inscribed.
Trancriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected, and ads moved to the end of the book.

PREFACE.
It is ten years since "The Colonel's Daughter" ventured before the public and found so many friends that "Marion's Faith" and later "Captain Blake" set forth in reinforcement, and even then there came the call for more. Pelham's old regiment was not the only one to contain either odd, laughable, or lovable characters, so now the curtain is raised on the Eleventh Horse,--a command as apocryphal as the --th, yet equally distinguished in the eyes of those who trod the war-path twenty years ago.
C. K.
October, 1894.

UNDER FIRE.
CHAPTER I.
It was the last day of Captain Wilbur Cranston's leave of absence. For three blissful months he had been visiting his old home in a bustling Western city, happy in the happiness of his charming wife in this her first long restoration to civilization since their marriage ten years before; happy in the pride and joy of his father and mother in having once more under their roof the soldier son who had won an honored name in his profession, and in their delight in the exuberant health and antics of two sturdy, plains-bred little Cranstons. The visit proved one continuous round of home pleasures and social gayeties, for Margaret Cranston had been a stanch favorite in the days of her girl- and bellehood, and all her old friends, married and single, rose en masse to welcome her return. Parties, dances, dinners, concerts, theatre and opera, lectures, pictures, parks, drives and rides,--all the endless resources of the metropolitan world had been laid at the feet of the girl who, leaving them to follow her soldier lover to his exile and wanderings, had returned in the fulness of time, in the flush of womanhood, a proud wife and proud and happy mother. People could not understand her choice at the time of her marriage: "Cranston's all right, but the idea of going to live in a tent or dug-out," was the popular way of putting it, and people were still unable to understand how she could have ever found anything to enjoy in that wild life or to make her wish to see it again. It was, therefore, incomprehensible to society that she and her two bouncing boys were utterly overwhelmed with distress at having to remain in so charming a circle, so happy a home, when it came time for the captain to return. Society even resented it a little. Juvenile society--feminine--took it amiss that the Cranston boys should so scorn the arts of peace, and persist furthermore in saying the buffalo and bear and wolves in the municipal "Zoo" were frauds as compared with what they had seen "any day" all around them out on the plains. Tremendous stories did these little Nimrods tell of the big game on which they had tired of dining, but some of their tales were true, and that's what made it so hard for junior society masculine, in which there wasn't a boy who did not honestly and justly hate these young frontiersmen, even while envying with all his civilized heart. Loud was the merriment at school over the Cranstons' blunders in spelling and arithmetic, but what--what was that as offset to their prowess on pony-back, their skill with the bow and sling-shot, their store of Indian trinkets, trophies, ay, even to the surreptitiously shown Indian scalp? What was that to the tales of tremendous adventure in the land of the Sioux and Apache,--the home of the bear and the buffalo? What city-bred boy could "hold a candle" to the glaring halo about the head of two who could claim personal acquaintance with the great war