While I was watching them, the small garrison band began suddenly to play, and the smiling soldier faces clouded as they glanced around in questioning surprise.
"Saint Guise!" ejaculated De Croix, uneasily; "it is the Dead March!" I marked the sudden look of terrified astonishment in Mademoiselle's eyes, and dropped my hand upon hers where it rested against the saddle-pommel.

Ensign Ronan spurred swiftly back down the column, with an angry face, and hushed the ill sound by a sharp order.
"Another tune, you fool, or none at all!" he said, peremptorily.

"The foul fiend himself must have assumed charge of our march to-day." As the column marched away, the groaning wagons one by one fell into line behind it, until at last our own turn came, and De Croix and I, each with a hand upon the bridle-rein of Mademoiselle's spirited horse, rode between the gate-posts out to where we had full view of that stirring scene below.
It was a fair, bright morning, with hardly so much as a fleecy white cloud in all the expanse of sky; glorious sunlight was flashing its prismatic colors over a lake surface barely ruffled by the faintest breeze.

Never did Nature smile more brightly back into my eyes than then, as I gazed out over the broad plain where the glow of the summer reflected back in shimmering waves from the tawny prairie and glittering sand.

With all its desolation, it was a picture to be treasured long; nor has a single detail of it ever left my memory.
How vast the distances appeared through that clear, sun-illumined atmosphere, and how pronounced and distinctive were the varied colors spread to the full vista of the eye, contrasts of shine and shadow no human brush, however daring, would venture to depict on canvas.