e the homely, narrow cot, seized his hand in hers, and looked
him in the face. "Where are they, Will?" she pleaded. "Quick! I must have
them now!" But well she realized that the spell was broken--that the old
fascination had died its death. Then it was useless to hint at love; and
in a torrent of impassioned words she bade him think of all he owed her,
appealed to his sense of gratitude and honor, and there, too, failed,
for, admitting all she claimed, he clumsily, haltingly, yet honestly told
her he saw now that it was all for an object, all done in the hope that
he might become her instrument for the recovery of those compromising
letters; and now that fate had delivered them into his hands he was bound
by honor and his promise--unheard, unspoken perhaps, but all the same his
promise--to the dead to give them to General Drayton.

Then rising in fury and denunciation, she played her last trump.
Trembling from head to foot, pale with baffled purpose and with growing
dread, she bent over him, both hands clinched.

"You mad fool!" she cried. "Do you know what I can do--will do--unless
you give them to me here and now? As God hears me, Will Gray, I will give
that other packet to General Drayton myself and swear that Colonel Canker
was right--that you _were_ the thief he thought you, and that I got those
letters from you."

For a moment she stood there, menacing, at his bedside, looking down in
almost malignant triumph on his amazed and incredulous face; and then,
with an awful fear checking the beat of her heart and turning her veins
to ice, she grasped at the flimsy framework that supported the netting
over the cot, and stood swaying and staggering, her eyes fixed in terror
on the man in the uniform of a colonel, who, quietly entering, stood
between her and the door, two papers in his half-extended hand--a man
whose voice, long and too well known, cut her to the very quick as she
heard, in calm and measured tone the words:

"Mrs. Garrison, here are two reasons why you will do nothing of the kind.
Shall I hand these to General Drayton--or to your husband?"

CHAPTER XVIII.

The long wait for the coming of the big transports with the regulars was
over. For the first time in history America was sending her soldiery past
the pyramids and through the Indian sea, landing them, after forty days
and nights of voyaging, upon the low, flat shores that hem Manila Bay,
and shoving them out to the hostile front before thei