Wizard Will, the Wonder Worker

by Prentiss Ingraham

At last the war ended, the City of Mexico was in the hands of General Scott, and the Daring Dragoons, commanded by Colonel Ivey, were ordered home.

Instantly, he sought his rival, and reminded him of his words at the breaking out of hostilities, and the two met in personal combat upon the duelling field.

It was a duel with swords, and each man meant that it should be to the death, that no mercy should be shown, and it could end in but one way—the death of one, or both.

It was fought through to the bitter end, and Dick Ivey left his hated enemy dead upon the field.

Resigning his commission, he returned to his home in the State of Mississippi, and yet he remained there but a short while, for the spirit of unrest was upon him, and the papers teeming with stories of his career, he sailed for foreign lands and remained abroad for years.

Again, he returned to America and settled in an elegant bachelor-home upon a fashionable avenue in New York city, a man of noble impulses, yet one upon whose life a shadow had fallen, and who carried in his heart a skeleton of bitter memories.

Such was the man who had found Will Raymond's lost gold-piece, and his career, from a cadet at West Point, to his living a luxurious bachelor life in New York, Mrs. Raymond read to her children that Thanksgiving night after he had left; for the distinguished soldier had begged an invitation to eat his Thanksgiving turkey that day in the humble home of the woman he had so strangely met, and who, by some strange accident, had pasted in her scrap-book his picture, as a young soldier, and the scraps of his life history as she had then read them, never dreaming that she would meet the hero with the dark, handsome face, dressed in his gorgeous Dragoon uniform.

To her children then, that Thanksgiving night, after he had departed, Mrs. Raymond read the history of the Dashing Dragoon, and he became to Will and Pearl a hero also in their eyes, and warm was the welcome that he received when he came the next day to tell Mrs. Raymond that he had adopted all of them as protegées, and meant to take them to a pleasant home and send the children to school.

This promise he kept, for he would not be said nay, and Mrs. Raymond, grown almost happy-faced with the change, moved to a pleasant little home in the upper part of the city, and Will and Pearl daily attended the most fashionable schools in the metropolis.