It was a broiling hot day when Rachel Bond descended from the ambulance which had brought her from the station to camp.

She shielded her eyes with a plam-leaf fan, and surveyed the surroundings of the post of duty to which she had been assigned. She found herself in a little city of rough plank barracks, arranged in geometrically correct streets and angles about a great plain of a parade ground, from which the heat radiated as from a glowing stove. A flag drooped as if wilted from the top of a tall pole standing on the side of the parade-ground opposite her. Languidly pacing in front of the Colonel's tent was an Orderly, who had been selected in the morning for his spruce neatness, but who now looked like some enormous blue vegetable, rapidly withering under the sun's blistering rays.

Beyond were the barracks, baking and sweltering, cracking their rough, unpainted sides into yawning fissures, and filling the smothering air with resinous odors distilled from the fat knots in the refuse planking of which they were built. Beyond these was the line of camp-guards--bright gun-barrels and bayonets glistening painfully, and those who bore them walking with as weary slowness as was consistent with any motion whatever, along their beats.