tightly-drawn lips, quiet, steel-gray eyes, a tracery of blue veins
showing on his full temples, he suggested the ascetic no less than the
soldier, while his incisive brevity of speech, flavored now and then
with pungent humor, without any inflection in his dry voice, was in
keeping with his appearance. He arrived with the clerks in the morning
and frequently remained after they were gone. His life was an affair of
calculated units of time; his habits of diet and exercise all regulated
for the end of service. His subordinates, whose respect he held by the
power of his intellect, said that his brain never tired and he had not
enough body to tire. He was one of the wheels of the great army machine
and loved the work for its own sake too well to be embittered at being
overshadowed by a younger man. As a master of detail Westerling regarded
him as an invaluable assistant, with certain limitations, which were
those of the pigeonhole and the treadmill.

As for Bouchard, nature had meant him to be a wheel-horse. He had never
had any hope of being chief of staff. Hawk-eyed, with a great beak nose
and iron-gray hair, intensely and solemnly serious, lacking a sense of
humor, he would have looked at home with his big, bony hands gripping a
broadsword hilt and his lank body clothed in chain armor. He had a
mastiff's devotion to its master for his chief.

"Since Lanstron became chief of intelligence of the Browns information
seems to have stopped," said Westerling, but not complainingly. He
appreciated Bouchard's loyalty.

"Yes, they say he even burns his laundry bills, he is so careful,"
Bouchard replied.

"But that we ought to know," Westerling proceeded, referring very