From the first sergeant down to the newest recruit, all the men had grown fond of little Fred in that year of rough scouting and campaigning around old Red Cloud's reservation--all of them, that is to say, with the possible exception of Dawson, who annoyed him in many ways when the officers or first sergeant did not happen to be near, and who sometimes spoke sneeringly of him to such of the troopers as would listen, but these were very few in number.
Fred was the only son of brave old Sergeant Waller, who had served with the regiment all over the plains before the great war of the rebellion, and who had been its standard-bearer in many a sharp fight and stirring charge in Virginia. Now he carried two bullet wounds, and on his bronzed cheek a long white seam, a saber scar, as mementoes of Beverly Ford, Winchester, and Five Forks, and through the efforts of his war commanders a comfortable berth as ordnance sergeant had been secured for him at one of the big frontier posts along the railway. Fred was the pride of the old soldier's heart, and nothing would do but that he, too, must be a trooper. The boy was born far out across the plains in sight of the Chihuahua Mountains, had followed the regiment in his mother's arms up the valley of the Rio Grande to the Albuquerque, then eastward along the Indian-haunted Smoky Hill route to Leavenworth. When the great war burst upon the nation little Fred was just beginning to toddle about the whitewashed walls of the laundresses' quarters--his father was Corporal Waller then--and his baby eyes were big as saucers when he was carried aboard of a big steamship and paddled down the muddy Missouri and around by Cairo and up the winding Ohio to Cincinnati. He was even more astonished at the railway cars that bore the soldiers and a few women and children eastward and finally landed them at Carlisle. There at the old cavalry barracks the little fellow grew to lusty boyhood, while his father was bearing the blue and gold standard through battle after battle on the Virginia soil. And when the war was over and the regiment was hurried out to "the plains," and again to protect the settlers, the emigrants, and the railway builders from the ceaseless assaults of the painted Indians, little Fred went along, and his soldier education was fairly begun.