Under Fire

Under Fire, by Charles King

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Title: Under Fire
Author: Charles King
Illustrator: C. B. Cox
Release Date: December 14, 2006 [EBook #20101]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FIRE ***

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[Illustration: RED DOG'S ARREST.
Frontispiece. Page 264.]

UNDER FIRE.
BY
CAPT. CHARLES KING, U.S.A.,
AUTHOR OF "THE COLONEL'S DAUGHTER," "MARION'S
FAITH," "CAPTAIN BLAKE," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY C. B. COX.
"A bad dhrill, a wake voice, an' a limp leg--thim three things are the
signs av a bad man."--PRIVATE MULVANEY.
PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 1895.
COPYRIGHT, 1894, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT
COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.
TO
GENERAL WESLEY MERRITT, U.S. ARMY,
OUR HONORED COLONEL IN THE OLD DAYS AND A VALUED
FRIEND THROUGH ALL THESE LATER
YEARS, THIS STORY
IS
Inscribed.
Trancriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected, and ads moved to

the end of the book.

PREFACE.
It is ten years since "The Colonel's Daughter" ventured before the
public and found so many friends that "Marion's Faith" and later
"Captain Blake" set forth in reinforcement, and even then there came
the call for more. Pelham's old regiment was not the only one to contain
either odd, laughable, or lovable characters, so now the curtain is raised
on the Eleventh Horse,--a command as apocryphal as the --th, yet
equally distinguished in the eyes of those who trod the war-path twenty
years ago.
C. K.
October, 1894.

UNDER FIRE.
CHAPTER I.
It was the last day of Captain Wilbur Cranston's leave of absence. For
three blissful months he had been visiting his old home in a bustling
Western city, happy in the happiness of his charming wife in this her
first long restoration to civilization since their marriage ten years before;
happy in the pride and joy of his father and mother in having once more
under their roof the soldier son who had won an honored name in his
profession, and in their delight in the exuberant health and antics of two
sturdy, plains-bred little Cranstons. The visit proved one continuous
round of home pleasures and social gayeties, for Margaret Cranston had
been a stanch favorite in the days of her girl- and bellehood, and all her
old friends, married and single, rose en masse to welcome her return.
Parties, dances, dinners, concerts, theatre and opera, lectures, pictures,
parks, drives and rides,--all the endless resources of the metropolitan
world had been laid at the feet of the girl who, leaving them to follow

her soldier lover to his exile and wanderings, had returned in the
fulness of time, in the flush of womanhood, a proud wife and proud and
happy mother. People could not understand her choice at the time of
her marriage: "Cranston's all right, but the idea of going to live in a tent
or dug-out," was the popular way of putting it, and people were still
unable to understand how she could have ever found anything to enjoy
in that wild life or to make her wish to see it again. It was, therefore,
incomprehensible to society that she and her two bouncing boys were
utterly overwhelmed with distress at having to remain in so charming a
circle, so happy a home, when it came time for the captain to return.
Society even resented it a little. Juvenile society--feminine--took it
amiss that the Cranston boys should so scorn the arts of peace, and
persist furthermore in saying the buffalo and bear and wolves in the
municipal "Zoo" were frauds as compared with what they had seen
"any day" all around them out on the plains. Tremendous stories did
these little Nimrods tell of the big game on which they had tired of
dining, but some of their tales were true, and that's what made it so hard
for junior society masculine, in which there wasn't a boy who did not
honestly and justly hate these young frontiersmen, even while envying
with all his civilized heart. Loud was the merriment at school over the
Cranstons' blunders in spelling and arithmetic, but what--what was that
as offset to their prowess on pony-back, their skill with the bow and
sling-shot, their store of Indian trinkets, trophies, ay, even to the
surreptitiously shown Indian scalp? What was that to the tales of
tremendous adventure in the