“Their tunnel, sir. It’s Libby on a small scale over again. They must have been at work at it at least ten days.” And as he spoke, calmly ignoring Canker and letting his eyes wander over the floor, the veteran battalion commander sauntered across the room, stirred up a slightly projecting bit of flooring with the toe of his boot and placidly continued. “If you’ll be good enough to let the men pry this up you may understand.”
And when pried up and lifted away—a snugly fitting trapdoor about two feet square—there yawned beneath it, leading slantwise downward in the direction of the street, a tunnel through the soft yielding sand, braced and strengthened here and there with lids and sides of cracker-boxes. “Now, if you don’t mind straddling a fence, sir, I’ll show you the other end,” said the captain, imperturbably leading the way, and Canker, half-dazed yet wholly in command of his stock of blasphemy, followed. At the curb, right in the midst of a lot of loose hay from the bales dumped there three days before, the leader dislodged with his sword the top of a clothing box that had been thickly covered with sand and hay—and there was the outlet. “Easy as rolling off a log, colonel,” said old Cobb, with a sarcastic grin. “This could all be done without a man you’ve blamed and arrested being a whit the wiser. They sawed a panel out of the floor, scooped the sand out of this tunnel, banked it solid against the weather boarding inside, filled up the whole space, pretty near, but ran their tunnel under fence and sidewalk, crawled down the gutter to the next block out of sight of the sentries, then walked away free men. Those three thieves who got away were old hands. The other men in the guardhouse were only mild offenders, except Morton. ’Course he was glad of the chance to go with ’em. I s’pose you’ll release my sergeant and those sentries now.”
“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” answered Canker, red with wrath, “and your suggestion is disrespectful to your commanding officer. When I want your advice I’ll ask for it.”
“Well, Mr. Gray will be relieved to learn of this anyhow. I suppose I may tell him,” hazarded the junior member, mischievously.
“Mr. Gray be ——. Mr. Gray has everything to answer for!” shouted the angered colonel. “It was he who telephoned for a carriage to meet and run those rascals off. Mr. Gray’s fate is sealed. He can thank God I don’t slap him into the guardhouse with his chosen associates, but he shan’t escape. Sergeant of the guard, post a sentry over Lieutenant Gray’s tent, with orders to allow no one to enter or leave it without my written authority. Mr. Gray shall pay for this behind the prison bars of Alcatraz.”
CHAPTER VIII.
Social circles at West Point at long, rare intervals are shocked by a scandal, and at short ones, say every other summer—are stirred by some kind of a sensation, and the “Fairy Sisters” were the sensation of the year ’97. They came in July; they went in September, and meanwhile they were “on the go,” as they expressed it, from morn till late at night. Physically they were the lightest weights known to the hop room. Mentally, as their admirers in the corps expressed it, “either of them can take a fall out of any woman at the Point,” and this was especially true of the elder—Mrs. Frank Garrison—whose husband was on staff duty in the far West. Both were slight, fragile, tiny blondes with light blue eyes, with lighter, fluffy hair, with exquisite little hands and feet, with oval, prettily shaped faces, and the younger—the maiden sister, had a bewitching mouth and regular, snowy dots of teeth of which she was justly proud. Yet, as has been previously said of Mrs. Frank, while the general effect was in the case of each that of an extremely pretty young girl, the elder had no really good features, the younger only that one. They generally dressed very much alike in light, flimsy gowns, and hats, gloves and summer shoes all of dazzling white—sometimes verging for a change to a creamy hue—but colors, except for sashes or summer shawls, seemed banished from their wardrobes. They danced divinely, said the corps, and preferred cadet partners, to the joy of the battalion. They rode fearlessly and well, and had stunning hats and habits, but few opportunities for display thereof. They came tripping down the path from the hotel every morning, fresh and fair as daisies, in time for guard mounting, and at any hour after that could be found chatting with cadet friends at the visitors’ tent, strolling arm in arm about the shaded walks with some of their many admirers until time to dress for the evening hop, where they never missed a dance, and on rainy days, or on those evenings when there was neither hop nor band practice, they could be found, each in some dimly lighted, secluded nook about the north or west piazza or on the steps leading down to the “Chain Battery Walk,” sometimes surrounded by a squad of cadet friends, but more frequently in murmured tête-à-tête with only one cavalier. In the case of Mrs. Frank no member of the corps seemed especially favored. She was just the same to every one. In the case of her younger sister—Miss Terriss—there presently developed a dashing young cadet captain who so scientifically conducted his campaign that he headed off almost all competitors and was presently accorded the lead under the universally accepted theory that he had won the little lady’s heart. Observant women—and what women are not observant—of each other?—declared both sisters to be desperate flirts. Society at the Point frowned upon them and, after the first formal call or two, dropped them entirely—a thing they never seemed to resent in the least, or even to notice. They were never invited out to tea or dinner on the post—solemn functions nowhere near so palatable as the whispered homage of stalwart young manhood. “Nita is yet such a child she infinitely prefers cadet society, and I always did like boys,” explained Mrs. Garrison. Some rather gay old boys used to run up Saturday afternoons on the Mary Powell and spend Sunday at the Point—Wall Street men of fifty years and much lucre. “Dear old friends of father’s,” Mrs. Frank used to say, “and I’ve simply got to entertain them.” Entertained they certainly were, for her wit and vivacity were acknowledged on every side, and entertained not only collectively, but severally, for she always managed to give each his hour’s confidential chat, and on the Sundays of their coming had no time to spare for cadet friends. Moreover, she always drove down in the big ’bus with them Monday morning when the Powell was sighted coming along that glorious reach from Polopel’s Island, and stood at the edge of the wharf waving her tiny kerchief—even blowing fairy kisses to them as they steamed away. No wonder Nita Terriss was frivolous and flirtatious with such an example, said society, and its frowns grew blacker when the White Sisters, the Fairy Sisters—the “Sylphites,” came in view. But frowns and fulminations both fell harmless from the armor of Mrs. Frank’s gay insouçiance. Nita winced at first, but soon rallied and bore the slights of the permanent and semi-permanent residents as laughingly as did her more experienced sister. Nita, it was explained, was only just out of school, and Mrs. Frank was giving her this summer at the Point as a great treat before taking her to the far West, where the elder sister must soon go to join her husband. Everybody knew Frank Garrison. He had long been stationed at the Academy, and was a man universally liked and respected—even very highly regarded. All of a sudden the news came back to the Point a few months after his return to his regiment that he was actually engaged to “Witchie” Terriss. Hot on the heels of the rumor came the wedding cards—Lieutenant-Colonel and Mrs. Terriss requested the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Margaret to Lieutenant Francis Key Garrison, —th U. S. Cavalry, at the Post Chapel, Fort Riley, Kansas, November —, 1894—all in Tiffany’s best style, as were the cards which accompanied the invitation. “What a good thing for old Bill Terriss!” said everybody who knew that his impecuniosity was due to the exactions and extravagancies of his wife and “Witchie.”—“And what a bad thing for Frank Garrison!” was the echo. His intimates knew that he had “put by” through economy and self-denial about two thousand dollars, the extent of his fortune outside of his pay. “She’ll make ducks and drakes of it in the six weeks’ honeymoon,” was the confident prophecy, and she probably did, for, despite the fact that he had so recently rejoined the regiment, “Witchie” insisted on a midwinter run to New Orleans, Savannah and Washington, and bore her lord, but not her master, over the course in triumph. To a student of human nature—and frailty—that union of a faded and somewhat shopworn maid of twenty-seven to an ardent and vigorous young soldier many moons her junior was easy to account for. One after another Witchie Terriss had had desperate affairs with half a dozen fellows, older or younger, in the army and was known to have been engaged to five different men at different times, and believed to have been engaged to two different men at one time. Asked as to this by one of her chums she was reported to have replied: “Do you know, I believe it true; I had totally forgotten about Ned Colston before Mr. Forman had been at the post a week. Of course the only thing to do was to break with both and let them start fresh.” But this Mr. Colston, whose head had been somewhat cleared by a month of breezy, healthful scouting, accepted only in part—that part which included the break. Forman had the fresh start and a walk over and held the trophy just two months, when it dawned upon him that Margaret loved dancing far more than she did him—a clumsy performer, and that she would dance night after night, the lightest, daintiest creature in the hop room, and never have a word or a look for him who leaned in gloomy admiration against the wall and never took his eyes off her. He became jealous, moody, ugly-tempered and finally had the good luck to get his congé as the result of an attempt to assert himself and limit her dances. She was blithe and radiant and fancy free when Frank Garrison reached the post, a wee bit hipped, it was whispered, because of the failure of a somewhat half-hearted suit of his in the far East, and the Fairy bounded into the darkness of his life and fairly dazzled him. Somebody had said Frank Garrison had money.
There is no need to tell of the disillusion that gradually came. Frank found his debts mounting up and his cares increasing. She was all sympathy and regret when he mentioned it, but—there were certain comforts, luxuries and things she had always been accustomed to, and couldn’t live without. Surely he would not have her apply to papa. No, but—could she not manage with a little less? He was willing to give up his cigars (indeed, he had long since done so) and to make his uniforms last a year longer—he who was in his day the most carefully dressed man at the Point. Well—she thought perhaps he ought to do that—besides—men’s fashions changed but slowly, whereas women’s—“Well, I’d rather be dead than out of style, Frank!”