Two nights thereafter, toward one o'clock, Major Dwight, with the post adjutant and Dr. Waring in attendance, knocked for admission at his own front door and knocked repeatedly before Felicie could be induced to appear with the to-be-expected plea that Madame had but just composed herself after nights of sleepless weeping, and surely she could not now be disturbed. Dwight demanded instant admission and, finding parley useless, Felicie unbarred the door and unloosed her tongue. "Shut up, you Jezebel!" said the doctor impolitely. "Sit down there and be quiet."

Dwight was already mounting the stair, and presently could be heard demanding admission to his wife's room. There was whimpering appeal in the response, but the door was speedily unlocked, and the voice of Inez could be heard in tones suggestive of unspeakable shock and grief and sense of indignity and injustice. Presently Dwight came down again.

"Unbolt that dining-room door--and the back!" said he curtly to the trembling maid, and when she would have demurred, seized her not too gently by the arm, almost as he had seized little Jim, and propelled her ahead of him into the dining-room. It was significant that the adjutant remained at the front door. It was more significant that when the rear door finally swung open there stood a silent sergeant of the guard, while the waning moon glinted upon the bayonets of certain soldiers on the level below. Felicie shrank at the announcement, yet could hardly have been unprepared for it: "Someone opened from within a moment ago, sir, and darted back at sight of the cap and b.u.t.tons."

"Bring two men and come in," was the brief answer, and then with lighted candles and a lantern a search began, a search for many minutes utterly without result, though another sergeant came and the officer of the day, and all this time Felicie was begging to be restored to Madame, who would a.s.suredly again be prostrated and in need of her, and Dwight said, "Let her go," whereat, as was noted, she darted first to her own room, not to Madame's, and presently the search began again on the second floor; and, to the amaze of the domestics aloft, soon invaded the very garret itself, where first there was found the print of stocking feet on a dusty plank, just as from under a box in the kitchen a pair of shoes were pulled forth never worn by any authorized inmate of those quarters.

Then more lanterns went up the back stairs and more prodding followed in the loft, and presently the watchers below heard stifled sounds of excitement and scurry, and then, wild-eyed and striving to be strictly professional, Sergeant Jennison descended and said: "We've got him, sir.

He's chokin' like."

And presently again, limp, half-suffocated, smeared with dust and dirt, in shirt sleeves and trousers coated with cobwebs and lint, there was lowered to the second floor and shoved out on the landing at the head of the stairs an almost unrecognizable creature, still struggling for breath. "No man that wasn't made of rubber instead of flesh and bones could have doubled himself in where he was," said the corporal to the silent group, and, indeed, it looked as though he were doubling up again, for the knees gave way, the head fell forward, and but for restraining arms down would he have gone. The sergeant propped him up again. The doctor plied a wet sponge, and Felicie, at the door of her mistress' chamber, gasped in amaze: "_Mon Dieu!_ the miscreant who has terrified Madame!" Whereat the dull eyes of the miscreant began slowly to burn, and then to blaze; and, finally, as a faint color showed in his sallow cheek, and the officer of the day, his official captor, bluntly demanded explanation of his being in this house and at this time of night, and both he and Waring and the adjutant, too, as it later appeared, had all swiftly decided that the one explanation, the only one, conceivable would be burglarious intent, to the utter amaze of every man present, to the dismay of Felicie, who screamed aloud, the head went suddenly up and back--oh, how well those who knew the Rays knew that gesture!--the dark eyes flashed in hate and rage, and the "miscreant's" voice rang out in defiance, triumph, almost exultation:

"What explanation? I'd have you know I'm the only man in this post who has legal right in that room. Ask the lady herself."

Dwight's jaw was drooping. Slowly he turned to where Felicie, after one short, half-stifled scream, stood staring wildly upon the prisoner, her hands clasped to her frizzled head. "Ask--this--woman, you mean?" he faltered, in the midst of almost breathless silence.

"That woman? No! _Ask my wife, who lies in that room!_"

Then, before any man could lay hand on and stop him, Dwight had sprung forward and struck the miscreant down.

Next morning the guard report bore the name, as a prisoner under sentry in hospital, of Private Blenke, of Company "C," and next night did Private Skelton, another patient, a precious tale unfold.

It was true that Skelton had once served in the old --th Cavalry, and, in common with many a man in his troop, had detested his first lieutenant, Foster. It was true that there were now in the garrison of Fort Minneconjou--two in the infantry and one in the cavalry--three men who had an ancient grudge against that officer. It was true that the sight of his hated face, hovering ever about the major's wife, had revived all the old rancor. Two of the number had sworn that if ever a time came when they could wreak their revenge upon him they would do it.

He had robbed one man of his sweetheart and two of their liberty, and had driven these two into desertion. Skelton had once been rather well-to-do, but drink and this trouble had ruined him. He had known Blenke as much as a year, had been a "super" in a traveling show company of which Blenke was a member. Blenke was a gymnast and trapeze performer of some note, and not a bad actor in dialect and minor roles. The company stranded. They were hundreds of miles from "home," without money, hope, or credit. Skelton steered Blenke to a recruiting office, and, once arrived at Minneconjou, Blenke became ambitious. He knew nothing of the regular army before; now he was determined to become an officer. Skelton alone knew anything of Blenke's past, and Skelton promised not to "split." The coming of Mrs. Dwight brought a remarkable change in Blenke, and when Captain Foster followed her and hung about her all day long, Skelton saw there was something much amiss. Blenke seemed going crazy through watching that lady and that man. Blenke had some clothes of Lieutenant Ray's that he kept hidden at Skidmore's, and Skelton felt sure that when the story went round about Lieutenant Ray's being seen at night, prowling back of the major's quarters, that Blenke was the real culprit. They were talking one day--Skelton and his former chums--of the chance they'd have now of waylaying the captain, and Blenke twitted them of not daring, even if they had the chance. They vowed then that if he would only show them a way, he could count on their doing it, and they did. Blenke had a plan matured, when suddenly the captain left, after the row with Lieutenant Ray, and then Blenke seemed just to take fire. He sent for them and unfolded another. The Captain's train was five hours late and he knew a way to lure him out on the road. He hated him, too, he said, and "we were beginning to see why.

He was so dead gone on the lady himself." He fixed the whole business, got a note to the captain, he said, the captain couldn't tell from her own writing, and it fetched him out just as was planned, and the rest was pretty much as the captain told it. Skelton at first didn't much care that an officer got credit for it all; Blenke had seen to that.

Blenke seemed to hate Lieutenant Ray--though he was forever copying him--most as much as he hated Foster; but when Skelton got to the agency, got to know Ray, got knocked down at the pow-wow and rescued by Ray, got shot and left to roast to death at the agency, and was again rescued by Ray, Skelton made up his mind that he'd sooner go to Leavenworth for life, if he lived, or to h.e.l.l if he didn't, than permit Mr. Ray to suffer another day in suspicion. It was Blenke who wore his dress at night and copied his very limp. It was Blenke that kept prowling about the major's, lallygagging with that French maid. It was high time Blenke himself was in limbo, and now they'd got him, they'd be wise to keep an eye on him.

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 a.s.s than I has never lived, but I was sincere in my a.s.sininity."

Nor was Sandy Ray the a.s.s 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 s.e.x, 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 Felicie, who applied unsuccessfully about this time to Mrs.

Gerald Stuyvesant for the position of nursery governess, or _bonne_.

Felicie 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 succ.u.mbed 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 pa.s.s 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.

Time and Dwight solved that problem, as time solves others. The major remained not long at Minneconjou, nor did the Rays. The former, with little Jim ever at his side, went eastward for a while, whence letters came occasionally from both father and son. The latter found divided duties. An interesting event, an arrival extraordinary, called for the presence of Mrs. Ray in distant Manhattan, and Priscilla looked her last for many a day upon the fords of the Minneconjou and those hated tenements on the hither sh.o.r.e, to whose permanence and prosperity her own efforts had lent such unlooked-for aid. A wiser woman in many a way was Priscilla Sanford when she turned her clear eyes eastward again.

Firm as before was her faith that she had a mission, but she had learned a lesson still needed by many of her sect, and by many of both s.e.xes.

She had a tale to unfold to most excellent theorists in the field that taught a new gospel in the cause of man's uplifting. They were found by Dwight and Jimmy at the seash.o.r.e, late that summer, and Priscilla strolled hand in hand with her boy friend along the shining sands, and talked long and gravely with his sire as to the real way of reaching the moral nature of the enlisted soldier. They were joined by Sandy for a day or two in September--a rather grave-faced young gentleman, despite recent promotion and longed-for orders to join his troop in far Luzon.

They were in no wise startled when a cable came from Colonel Ray--"Grandfather Billy" in spite of his looks--suggesting that they, too, come with Sandy. They were all at Manila in the late autumn, except the Dwights, and long before Christmas Priscilla had found in Colonel Blake, that old-time friend and comrade of Uncle Will, a most delighted listener to her theories. "Legs" was forever stumping round to the bungalow and starting Priscilla on her hobby, as he called it, and with preternatural gravity "drawing her out" as to the chief end of man.

Somebody had told him of her Anti-Canteen and Soldiers' Aid a.s.sociation at Minneconjou--and of its disruption, but he never twitted her as to that. It was the new scheme for the higher education and mental development of the soldier to which her energies were now bending, and as Blake was in town with little to do but nurse a wounded leg and serve on some perennial court-martial, he found his fun in frequent disquisitions with Priscilla, sometimes prolonging them until Mrs. Ray lost patience and drove him homeward, and privately wrote her liege lord, who was forever afield, running down _ladrones_, that he really must repress that irrepressible wag. "He isn't trying to flirt with Pris, is he?" asked Ray, inconsequently, on coming home, and was dull enough not to catch the full force of his wife's reply. "Flirt? Gerald Blake never knew how, and he's too much in love with his wife; and--besides----"

Priscilla was far too serious to flirt with any man, much as she might long to reform him. She did wish that the long, lank cavalryman could be induced to take her views as seriously as she took them herself, and as Major Dwight seemed to take them, for Dwight's letters were coming at regular intervals, and to Miss Sanford now rather than to Marion Ray, and for a time Priscilla read them aloud for the benefit of Blake, the scoffer, and that of Aunt Marion and Uncle Will, the ever-indulgent. And thus that warm, sunshiny Manila winter went its way and the summer rains began to flood the streets, and people took to aquatics, and excursions to Nagasaki and Yokohama; and thither flitted our friends, the elder Rays, with Blake to see them off, and a promise to keep Miss 'Cilla's library project moving. And the day the transport dropped them into waiting sampan in Nagasaki's wondrous harbor two packages of home letters were handed them by the resident quartermaster, just received by rail from Yokohama and the Nippon Maru, and that evening, on the broad white veranda of the old hotel, Priscilla Sanford's cheeks took on the hue of the summer sunset, and still Uncle Billy saw--and Aunt Marion said--nothing.

One afternoon, a few months later, the _Sheridan_ dropped anchor a mile or more out in the shallow, land-locked bay of Manila, and the launches and lighters brought the army pa.s.sengers ash.o.r.e, many of them for their second visit to the Philippines; and just as the band at the _kiosk_ on the Luneta began the daily concert, and carriages of every kind drew up along the curb, and officers in spotless white went cap-doffing from point to point, and fair women smiled and flirted their fans, Colonel Stone, but recently arrived, began telling for the twentieth time, at least, the story of the marvelous escapade by means of which the renowned Blenke secured his final freedom:

"Caught in Chicago; shipped back to the guard-house; shammed crazy, sir, till he fooled every surgeon in the Cheyenne Valley; got ordered to the government hospital for the insane; got supply of Skidmore whisky, properly doped; got the corporal drunk who went in charge of him, and, by gad, sir, got the corporal's outfit and papers and turned _him_ over at Washington as the insane man; got his receipt and vanished--the last ever heard of him. What became of her? Oh, after her flare-up with that poor devil Foster--you know the child didn't live--she got back to Mexico somehow: women like her never die--but she'll never be able to bother Dwight. That marriage, of course, wasn't legal. He'd simply been tricked. No, old Dwight's a free man, and I reckon he'll think twice before he tries it again."

Whereupon Stone was swiftly kicked in the shin by the long-legged lieutenant-colonel of cavalry at his side, for, in his enthusiasm, the colonel had turned and addressed his closing remarks to the two ladies in the nearmost carriage, and one of them was reddening like the rose.

"Dwight's here, you owl," said Blake, in explanation, later. "Came in on the _Sheridan_ this very afternoon, and he isn't so confounded free as you were in your remarks. Why--hadn't you _heard_? May be another case of 'out of the frying-pan into the fire'--a toss-up 'twixt 'Cilla and Charybdis, but----"

"Good Lord!" cried Stone, "and what did I say? You don't mean she's going to marry Dwight?"

"She can't help herself. He won't take no for an answer."

"Well--I'll--be--hanged," said Stone, reflectively, "and I ought to be.

It's just what my wife said--when the daily readings were going on--would likely be the upshot of the whole business. She said more than that--and she knows women, too--that Priscilla Sanford would make for him the best kind of a wife."