Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/33

 This "labor of the troops" was a great thing. It made the poor wretch who enlisted under the vague notion that his admiring country needed his services to quell hostile Indians, suddenly find himself a brevet architect, carrying a hod and doing odd jobs of plastering and kalsomining. It was an idea which never fully commended itself to my mind, and I have always thought that the Government might have been better served had such work, and all other not strictly military and necessary for the proper police and cleanliness of the posts, been assigned to civilians just as soon as representatives of the different trades could be attracted to the frontier. It would have cost a little more in the beginning, but it would have had the effect of helping to settle up our waste land on the frontier, and that, I believe, was the principal reason why we had a standing army at all.

The soldier felt discontented because no mention had been made in the recruiting officer's posters, or in the contract of enlistment, that he was to do such work, and he not unusually solved the problem by "skipping out" the first pay-day that found him with enough money ahead to risk the venture. It goes without saying that the work was never any too well done, and in the present case there seemed to be more paint scattered round about my room than would have given it another coat. But the floor was of rammed earth and not to be spoiled, and the general effect was certainly in the line of improvement. Colonel Dubois, our commanding officer, at least thought so, and warmly congratulated me upon the snug look of everything, and added a very acceptable present of a picture—one of Prang's framed chromos, a view of the Hudson near the mouth of Esopus Creek—which gave a luxurious finish to the whole business. Later on, after I had added an Apache bow and quiver, with its complement of arrows, one or two of the bright, cheery Navajo rugs, a row of bottles filled with select specimens of tarantulas, spiders, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and others of the fauna of the country, and hung upon the walls a suit of armor which had belonged to some Spanish foot-soldier of the sixteenth century, there was a sybaritic suggestiveness which made all that has been related of the splendors of Solomon and Sardanapalus seem commonplace.

Of that suit of armor I should like to say a word: it was found by Surgeon Steyer, of the army, enclosing the bones of a man, in the arid country between the waters of the Rio Grande and the