Yet she was present to the waking dreams he dreamed of his early youth--they could not be dreamed without her. She had been his playmate, his _protégé_; as her younger, stronger sister had been his natural antagonist and aversion. The father had been his guardian. And when Paul went as sutler and trader to New Mexico, just as Laura was budding into girlhood, it was tacitly understood that on his return he would claim her as his betrothed. Years passed, and when old Mr. Taylor felt his end approaching, he begged Paul to return, and be to his two daughters the protector that he had been to Paul's helpless childhood. Soon after Laura's marriage, Mr. Taylor died, firm in the belief that he had made a happy man of his favorite, Paul.
Before the mourning year was over, a schoolmate of Paul's, an army officer, some years his senior, came to spend a month's furlough at the old Taylor mansion. When he left, he was the willing slave and avowed suitor of Regina, the queenly younger sister of Laura. If there were no hearty congratulations from Paul's side, I doubt that either Colonel Douglass, in his happiness, or Laura, in her self-absorption, felt the withholding of his kind wishes; and Regina cared very little either for his favor or his disapproval.
Even before they were married, Regina knew that after a few short weeks spent in the home-like, elegant quarters at the arsenal, they must leave the ease and luxuries of civilization for the wilds of some frontier country. But Regina was content to reign over the limited number of hearts to be found in a frontier's camp, as she had reigned over her train of admirers in the ball-room and at the watering-places; and, to the delight of her husband, she uttered no word of complaint when an order from the War Department sent them to an adobe-built fort on the Rio Pecos, in the most desolate part of all New Mexico.
"Now, I should like to go with you, Hal," had said his brother-in-law, when he read him the order; and he raised his head and flung back his hair, as though he felt the wild, free wind of the Plains tossing it.
Paul rode back from the arsenal slowly that evening; and the nearer home he came, the lower drooped his head, the darker grew his brow. At home he paced the floor uneasily, paying little heed to the feeble whimpering of his wife, who had been frittering her life away between camphor-bottles and sentimental novels since Regina had left the house.