He turned his large, intelligent eyes on Broussard, saying as plainly as a horse can speak: "Good-bye, good master.

Never will I, your faithful horse, forget you." Broussard, walking rapidly off, in the bright January morning, turned around for one last glimpse at the house that held Anita.

At that moment the great doors of the Commandant's house opened, and Anita, with a long crimson cloak around her and a hood over her head, ran down the broad stone steps to where Gamechick was standing like a bronze horse, the best-trained and best-mannered and best-bred cavalry charger at Fort Blizzard.

Anita put her arm about his neck and rubbed her cheek against his satin coat, Gamechick receiving her caresses with dignity, as a cavalry charger should, and not with the tender bondings and nosings for lumps of sugar, like Pretty Maid.

The last glimpse Broussard had of Anita was, as she stood, her arm about Gamechick's neck, her crimson mantle falling away from her graceful shoulder.
[Illustration: The last glimpse Broussard had of Anita was, as she stood, her arm about Gamechick's neck.] "How much simpler," thought Broussard, as he buttoned his heavy fur coat, for the ride to the station, "is love for a horse, for a child, for anything created, than love for a woman! No man gets out of that business without complications, and when the woman is half a child, an idealist, precocious, an angel with a devil lurking somewhere about her, it's the most complicated thing on this planet!" Broussard carried these thoughts with him through the frozen Northwest, across the sapphire seas, and into the jungles of the tropics, to which he was destined..