When Blenke did appear on Wednesday afternoon his hands were bandaged, his face was disfigured a bit, but his eyes were as deep and mournful, his dignity and self-poise quite as unimpeachable, as before. He seemed grieved, indeed, that his captain and colonel both so sharply questioned him. He had intended going to Rapid City, but at the last moment in town received information rendering his visit unnecessary, indeed inadvisable. A man with whom he had had business associations in the past, and who owed him much money, had been there, but had headed him off by promising to meet him in Silver Hill. The train came, but not the man, yet the conductor said such a man had boarded the train at the Junction and must have dropped off as they slowed up for town after passing Bonner's Bluff. Blenke had spent most of Monday night and all of Tuesday in further search. Tuesday evening came a clue. The evasive "party" had been seen at Skid's drinking heavily, and Blenke hastened thither in partial disguise, he said, and was there when late Tuesday night the shrieks from Skidmore's private quarters told of peril. The drunken crowd in the bar at first took no heed. Shrieks were things of frequent occurrence, but Blenke had rushed, found the shack all ablaze within, and with difficulty and much personal risk had succeeded in pulling out Mrs. Skidmore and her terrified child.
Blenke by manner, not by words, continued to convey to his inquisitors that he took it much amiss that a soldier who had done such credit to his uniform and the service should on his return be subjected to such rigid cross-questioning, and be treated with such obvious suspicion. But both colonel and captain had more to ask. Had he seen aught of the trio from the fort who claimed to have spent Monday evening at Skidmore's? Blenke declared he had not. He had spent that evening searching about town; but he had heard of them, yes. There was no little talk among the cowboys, tramps, toughs, and ranchmen in and about Skidmore's concerning a party of soldiers that had been there hours Monday evening "raising the devil." There had been a rough-and-tumble fight, too, but Blenke virtuously disclaimed all personal knowledge of the men or their misdemeanors. Asked to name some of the places he had visited Monday evening and Tuesday in town, Blenke unhesitatingly mentioned as many as a dozen. The adjutant jotted them down, and when the colonel sent an officer in to investigate, it was found that Blenke's statement, like his manner, was irreproachable. Moreever, it was found by the testimony of certain hangers-on at Skidmore's that the story told by the incarcerated trio was equally true. They had been seen about the premises, drinking, card-playing, loafing, early in the evening, and "off and on" all of the evening, until toward 10:30 o'clock they became so ugly and quarrelsome and had so little money left that Skid refused them further admission, even to wash the blood from their battered faces. If the purpose of the examination was to connect these men, any of them, with the assault upon Foster, it had certainly failed.
Even when Foster's verbatim statement came, duly type-written and vouched for, and further examination was made, and Blenke and the three worthies were further investigated, nothing was admitted and little learned. Foster's statement was read by the adjutant and received in grim silence by the colonel and one or two seniors called in for the occasion. Smarting under the indignity with which he had been treated, said Foster, and finding the Flyer would not be along before ten or half-past ten, he decided to take a buggy, drive out to the post and seek an interview with the colonel and certain other officers. It was due to his honor that his statement be heard. He ordered his traps sent to the train, so that if delayed he could drive thither at once, or even have the ranchman caretaker at Fort Siding "flag the train." Barely two miles out from town he overtook some soldiers apparently drunk; one of them reeled almost under his horse's nose; he pulled up in dismay, and instantly they attacked him on all sides at once. He was knocked senseless, and when he came to himself they were all out on the southward prairie. He could see the lights of the fort far away. He was propped against a wheel and they were wrangling among themselves. He was bleeding, dazed, had been cruelly beaten, but his wits were returning. The moonlight was clear, and suddenly, in a row that broke out among them, they fell upon each other, and a young, slight-looking man, who seemed to be their leader, in striving to quell the row, lost the handkerchief that hid his face. His light raincoat was torn open, revealing the uniform of a lieutenant of cavalry. The form, features, the dark little mustache, all that he could see, were certainly those of Lieutenant Ray. Staggering to his feet, he unhappily drew their attention again to himself, and then he was slugged and knocked senseless and knew no more until he was being helped aboard the Pullman. One of the men he vaguely remembered having seen before, but the only one of the party he could have recognized was Lieutenant Ray. All Minneconjou, he said, knew of the fracas between them that day; but few, perhaps, had heard the lieutenant's threats, and in this brutal fashion had he fulfilled them.
Copies of this, of course, had gone to Department Headquarters. The commander was expected back at the end of the week from his tour of inspection at Yellowstone Park. Sandy could not be held in close arrest beyond the eighth day; but that the affair would have to be thoroughly investigated by general court everybody felt and said. Indeed, Ray himself would be content with nothing less. But what a solemn time was this for Marion, his devoted mother; indeed for all at Minneconjou.
Up at the "ranking" end of the row Oswald Dwight lay in the grasp of a burning fever that, coupled with what had gone before, had weakened his reason and might well end his life. Under the same roof, visited at intervals by the charitable, the sympathetic or the merely inquisitive of their sex and station, Mrs. Dwight and her inseparable companion, Félicie, made their moan and told their woeful tale to all comers. Inez had been, she said, suffering all the torments of purgatory, and to many eyes she looked it. Her husband, in his mad delirium, would not have her near him: he raved of the wife of his youth. She wept for his boy who had been taken from her, his proper, his natural, his legal protector at such a time. Inez was horrified to think of the outrage upon Captain Foster, their attached and devoted friend. Inez would never believe, she said, that such a gentleman as Mr. Ray could stoop to so vile a vengeance, to the level of the assassin, but Félicie had other views. The episode of that blood-stained gauntlet had been by no means forgotten, and was dinned into the ears of those who would listen, with infinite vim and pertinacity; this, too, despite the fact that Ray denied having worn gauntlets that evening—having worn them, in fact, that summer. They were no longer "uniform" for cavalry officers, and he had not set eyes on that glove or its mate for over a month. Possibly during the move from the major's quarters to the humble home of the subaltern, but certainly somehow, Ray had lost several items that, before the change in uniform, had been in frequent use, but of late would hardly be missed, and of these were the gauntlets.
So there was distress—anxiety—sorrowing in more than one of the many households at Minneconjou, and in the midst of it all Priscilla, who had thought her burden, self-inflicted though it was, quite as much as she could bear, was confronted with another. Blenke, who had been nervous, excitable, almost ill on the very few occasions she had seen him since his return; Blenke, who had promised to confide to her, his benefactress, the cause of his worries, the story of his woes; Blenke, whose mournful eyes had blazed with a fine fury when told by Hogan, who couldn't abide him, of Miss Sanford's salutation from the window of the reoccupied rookery at the ford; Blenke, who could never set foot on the floor of the Canteen, turned up missing one night at check rollcall, two hours after taps, was suddenly and most unexpectedly stumbled on by the officer of the day making his rounds at 3 A. M.: not, as might have happened to men of less indomitable virtue, coming from the direction of Skidmore's, but almost at the very opposite end of the garrison, at the rear gateway of the field officers' quarters, No. 2, so obviously obfuscated, so utterly limp, that he could give no account of himself whatever, was wheeled to the guard-house in a police cart and dumped on the slanting bunk of the prison room with a baker's dozen of the "Skidmore guard" sleeping off their unaccustomed drunk.
CHAPTER XVI
MY LADY'S MAID
It proved the last pound that broke the back of Priscilla's stubborn resistance. Men and women who had found much to condemn in Miss Sanford, who had disseminated and discussed the tale of her correspondence with the Banner and the talk that followed, who had heard with indignation that it was after Dwight's conference with Miss Sanford that he so furiously punished little Jim (for, as we know, Mrs. Thornton had assured everybody that so far as she was concerned she had done her utmost to make the major understand that Jimmy never did it on purpose), who had felt the lash of her over-candid comment on their social or parental shortcomings, now had no little malicious merriment to add to the deservedly hard things they had said of her. For a fortnight, probably, Miss Sanford had been the most unpopular woman that Minneconjou's oldest inhabitant could name; but the men and women who saw her as one after another she faced the results of her most confident efforts, began to feel for the lonely, sorrowing maiden a respect and sympathy denied her before. It was plain that Priscilla was well-nigh crushed, and "when women weep" and are desolate and hopeless resentment turns to pity and blame to words of cheer. No one, of course, was ever told by Mrs. Ray or by Sandy of what had passed in the sanctity of the family circle, but in her humility and contrition Priscilla spoke of it to Mrs. Stone and to others, who soon came to try to show her she was forgiven. There were a few days after Dwight's fever in which she seemed utterly heartbroken, and Mrs. Ray believed her seriously ill. There were days in which she begged Aunt Marion to send her home, when, really, she had no home; to send her East, then, where she could begin anew and work her way in the world. If it came to the worst, Maidie Stuyvesant would keep her from starving. But Aunt Marion would listen to no such proposition. Priscilla must stay with her and at Minneconjou and live down the unhappy repute. Aunt Marion knew how very much genuine good there was in Priscilla when once she could rid herself of that propensity ever to correct, criticise, and condemn; nor had Minneconjou been slow to see this and to speak of it. Now that the tide was turning, by dozens they came to talk of her real charity, her devotion to the sick and sorrowing, the hours she had given—was ever ready to give—to reading to the bed-ridden and helpless in hospital or the humble quarters of the married soldiers. Men who had laughed among themselves at her lecturing and preaching took to snubbing men who spoke in disparagement of her motives. One thing was certain, whether they shared her views or not, all Minneconjou believed in her sincerity, and soldiers honor those who fight and suffer for their convictions. Of Priscilla it might therefore be said she had made friends in spite of herself, and though hardened sinners at the mess and humor-loving husbands in the quarters did indulge in little flings at the ultimate and inevitable failure of all feminine meddlings in matters that were purely military, there were few, indeed, after the first mirthful explosions, who having seen her sorrowful face did not feel genuine sympathy for her in the collapse of her Anti-Canteen Soldiers' Benevolent Association.