“Colonel Brinton!” roared the general, getting to his feet. “You are a disgrace to the uniform of the United States army, and to the mother who bore you. You are a disgrace to the flag, and this day you have made your army and its general a laughing stock before their enemies. You are a drunkard and an incompetent; unfit to wear a uniform!”
Beside himself with blind fury, the general lurched forward across the table, seized Brinton by the shoulders, and ripped off both his epaulets.
“You are herewith degraded from rank!” he bellowed. “And you are dishonorably dismissed from the service you have disgraced. The President of the United States will confirm your dismissal. Leave this camp inside of one hour, and do not set foot in an army encampment or on official ground again. To-morrow, the announcement of your dismissal as a common drunkard shall be read to every regiment in the army.
“Go! Get out of here! And go on foot. The horse you rode is the property of the government you have disgraced. If you take him or any other army mount I will have you arrested as a horse-thief and add theft to drunkenness and insubordination in the published list of your achievements. Go!”
Brinton forced his horrified senses to a brief rally; clicked his booted heels together, raised to the salute a hand that no longer shook; wheeled, and with shoulders squared, marched from the room.
CHAPTER III
OUTCAST
A STRETCH of yellow ground broken here and there by black-green foliage patches and gray rocks. Above, a blazing white sun in a copper sky; the hot expanse broken by an occasional buzzard that hung moveless on broad serrated wings between earth and heaven.
And alone—almost infinitesimal in the boundless expanse—over the baking area of plain and rolling ground moved a dark blue speck.
On nearer observation this speck of blue resolved itself into a man. A man whose tangle of hair was covered by the discarded straw sombrero of some peon, whose face was haggard and unshaven, whose body was whimsically draped in the tatters of what had once been a United States army uniform, whose feet had by long tramping worn apart the soles and uppers of a once-spruce pair of cavalry boots.
More than a second glance would have been needed for any of the man’s former fellow-officers to recognize in the military scarecrow the faultlessly groomed Lieutenant-Colonel Brinton of General Zachary Taylor’s personal staff.