Aboard, leading her horse, the Special Messenger, booted and spurred, in a hybrid uniform of a subaltern of regulars, handed the bridle to a sailor and turned to salute the quarterdeck.
The United States gunboat, Kiowa, dropped anchor at the railroad wharf two days later, and ran out a blackened gangplank. Over it the Special Messenger, wrapped in her rubber cloak, led her horse to shore, mounted, and galloped toward the hill where the flag of corps headquarters was flapping in the wet wind.
The rain ended as she rode inland; ahead of her a double rainbow glowed and slowly faded to a rosy nimbus.
Corps headquarters was heavily impressive and paternally polite, referring her to headquarters of the unattached cavalry division.
She remounted, setting her horse at an easy canter for the intervening two miles, riding through acres of tents and vistas of loaded wagon trains; and at last an exceedingly ornamental staff officer directed her to her destination, and a few moments later she dismounted and handed her bridle to an orderly, whose curiously fashioned forage cap seemed strangely familiar.
As the Special Messenger entered his tent and saluted, the colonel of the Fourth Missouri Cavalry rose from a camp chair, standing over six feet in his boots. He was magnificently built; his closely clipped hair was dark and curly, his skin smoothly bronzed and flushed at the cheek bones; his allure that of a very splendid and grave and youthful god, save for the gayly impudent uptwist of his short mustache and the stilled humor in his steady eyes.
His uniform was entirely different from the regulation—he wore a blue forage cap with short, heavy visor of unpolished leather shadowing the bridge of his nose; his dark blue jacket was shell-cut; over it he wore a slashed dolman trimmed at throat, wrists and edges with fur; his breeches were buff; his boots finished at the top with a yellow cord forming a heart-shaped knot in front; at his heels trailed the most dainty and rakish of sabres, light, graceful, curved almost like a scimiter.
All this is what the Special Messenger saw as she entered, instantly recognizing a regimental uniform which she had never seen but once before in her brief life. And straight through her heart struck a pain swift as a dagger thrust, and her hand in its buckskin gauntlet fell limply from the peak of her visor, and the color died in her cheeks.
What the colonel of the Fourth Missouri saw before him was a lad, slim, rather pale, dark-eyed, swathed to the chin in the folds of a wet poncho; and he said, examining her musingly and stroking the ends of his curt mustache upward: