And so, with the case—the two cases—against Sandy Ray abruptly closed, the colonel, the surgeon and the adjutant, who had heard the confession, seemed also to think; for the sentry at the bedside of the mournful-eyed invalid received orders to bayonet him if he attempted to budge.
And all in vain, for, with the dawn of a bleak to-morrow, Private Blenke, no one could begin to say how, had slipped by his possibly drowsing guard and escaped. The prairie, the Minneconjou valley, the trains, were fruitlessly searched. The agile prisoner had fled from the wrath to come.
CHAPTER XXVII
EXEUNT OMNES
There is little left to tell. With the vanishing of the mysterious Blenke, "the man of the mournful eyes," there came swift unfolding of the pitiable scheme that, for a time, had set Minneconjou's nerves on edge, bewildering almost every man from the colonel down, and bedeviling most of the women. When one's own mother is ready to believe a man guilty, small blame to the rest of her kind and to the man's best friends that they should be of the same way of thinking. Moreover, neither then nor thereafter did Sandy Ray consider himself an innocent and injured person.
"If ever a fellow came within an ace of falling," said he to himself, and later to his best friend, his father, "it was I; for I believed her story—believed myself loved—believed she had been tricked into throwing me over for Dwight, and that, now that he had thrown her over because of it, and would have no more to do with her, she would soon be free. Then our marriage could follow. A greater ass than I has never lived, but I was sincere in my assininity."
Nor was Sandy Ray the ass he declared himself, for if ever that exquisite, catlike creature, Inez, loved anybody besides herself, she loved Sandy Ray, and was bent on winning him back, cost what it might. She quickly saw that his love for her lay dormant, not dead. She reveled in the joy of her probable power until, all on a sudden, one terrible night there came to her the shock of seeing a face she believed long since buried beneath the waves of the Pacific—that of the boy lover and husband who wooed and won her inflammable heart nearly five years earlier.
Blenke in a romantic epistle to Miss Sanford, Inez, through her lawyers, and her latest dupe, Stanley Foster—whose resignation from the army went eastward by the same train that bore him and that fair fugitive from Minneconjou—and finally the impeccable Farrells, all gave versions more or less veracious of that early marriage episode. But sifted down, this much of truth was ascertained. The two were cousins, with the vehement blood of the Antilles coursing in their veins. They loved, were married by a Texan justice of the peace, and, after a brief honeymoon across the Mexican line—a honeymoon of mingled bliss and battle—found the old people relentless and themselves squabbling and stranded. The elders swooped upon the girl-wife, bore her back to Texas and sent the strolling player to South America, with the promise never to return or bother them. They told her, and she refused to believe, that he speedily met his death at the hands of a jealous husband in Valparaiso. They later told her, and she fully believed, that, in defiance of his promise and in desire for her, he had determined to reclaim her as they were going to San Francisco, and was washed overboard from the Colima by a tidal wave. Inez, like a certain few of her sex, could believe anything possible for love—of her, and Stanley Foster went far toward confirming her views for as much as the month that followed their mad flight. Then, with his commission gone—and his illusions—he found himself bound to a woman whose fast-fading charms were no compensation for anything he had lost. Much of their misery, and her own, was told in metropolitan circles by Félicie, who applied unsuccessfully about this time to Mrs. Gerald Stuyvesant for the position of nursery governess, or bonne. Félicie had gone thither in hopes of extracting something from Foster's people, as nothing could be gotten from the Farrells since nothing short of extradition proceedings could induce their return to the States. It was the same miserable old story, and Sandy Ray many a time thanked Heaven, and Stone, and the senior surgeon, for the order that took him to the agency and away from Inez Dwight. Would he have succumbed had he stayed? Older and presumably wiser men have done worse, so why not Sandy? Perhaps mother and Priscilla were not all wrong in their forebodings.
But what a scene of love and repentance and rejoicing was that when those two women, Aunt Marion and her niece, compared notes over the episode of that night's vigil and Sandy's part therein. Then his story of his coming was true, after all! Priscilla had seen him entering the front gate; had heard him at the door; had heard him pass round to the side of the house. Blenke it was who, counterfeiting even the painful little limp that still hampered Sandy's movements, had caused so many to believe it was Billy Ray's firstborn, in the dead of night, invading the quarters of a brother-officer, to the scandal of the service. They saw it all now, these good people who had dreamed so wildly, and some few there were who went to Ray during the brief fortnight that followed her final disappearance and said: "We knew you couldn't have been guilty of such a thought," but Sandy did not thank them. In his downright impulsiveness he had gone to Stone and told him the truth, and said he had been guilty of such a thought, and asked the commander what he ought to say to Dwight; and Stone, after pondering over the matter, replied in effect, though not in these precise words, that he'd be d—elighted if he knew.