"Have you seen him—to-night?"
An instant's pause; then, "I don't know whether I have or not."
"You don't know?" exclaimed Curbit, puzzled and beginning to bristle.
"I don't know," repeated Lanier, positive and beginning to rejoice.
"Suppose the colonel tells me to explain that," began Curbit, but Doctor Schuchardt set his foot down summarily.
"Here," said he, "this thing's got to stop;" and he came to the door in his shirt sleeves, leaning half way out, with one hand behind him. "Lanier's in a highly nervous and excited state. He has had a fall—and I'm trying to get him to bed and asleep. He doesn't know—whom—he has seen since he got home in arrest, and you can say so for me."
"All right Shoe," was the philosophical answer. "It's none o' my funeral, and personally I don't give a cuss if they never find him, but there are just s-teen reasons why the Old Man wants to see that young man Rawdon forthwith, and as many for believing he's skipped."
"Then skip after him. You can track anything but a ghost in this new-fallen snow."
Curbit lowered his voice. "That's exactly the trouble, doctor. Go to the back of the quarters and see for yourself. His trail starts—and ends—here."
In all its history Fort Cushing had never known such a day of bewilderment as that which followed. Guard mounting was held as usual at eight a.m., and Colonel Button, awaiting in his office the coming of the old and the new officers-of-the-day, directed his adjutant to drop his own work at their entrance and give attention to what took place. Half a dozen other officers, with little or no business to transact at that hour, made it their business to be present, drawn thither from sheer sympathy, as some declared, and downright curiosity, as owned by others. The office building was large and roomy; the colonel's desk was close to the door; beyond it were tables spread with maps, magazines, and papers; a big stove stood in the middle, and a dozen chairs were scattered about, for it was here the officers met one evening each week in the one "book-schooling" to which they were then subjected—a recitation in regulations or "Tactics." Across the hall was a smaller office—the adjutant's—and beyond that the room where sat the sergeant-major and his clerks. The windows, snow-battered and frost-bitten, gave abundant light from the skies, but none on the surroundings—the view being limited to scratch-hole surveys. There was nothing to distract attention from what might be going on within, and all eyes were on the two burly captains who entered at 8.30, fur-capped, fur-gloved, in huge overcoats and arctics. The wind had begun, even earlier than usual, to whine and stir as it swept down from the bleak northwest, and the mercury had dropped some ten degrees since the previous evening.