suspect. Yet the
sergeant of the guard, searching cautiously with his lantern about the
post of Number Six, had come upon some suggestive signs. The snow was
trampled and bloody about the place where the soldier fell, and there
were here and there the tracks of moccasined feet,--those of a young
woman or child going at speed toward the hospital, running, probably,
and followed close by a moccasined man. Then those of the man, alone,
went sprinting down the bluff southeastward over the flats some distance
south of the Foster's doorway and up the opposite bluff, to a point
where four ponies, shoeless, had been huddled for as much, perhaps, as
half an hour. Then all four had come scampering down close together into
the space below the hospital, not fifty yards from where the sentry
fell, and the moccasined feet of a man and woman had scurried down the
bluff from the hospital window, to meet them west of Foster's shanty.
Then there had been confusion,--trouble of some kind: One pony, pursued
a short distance, had broken away; the others had gone pounding out
southeastward up the slope and out over the uplands, then down again, in
wide sweep, through the valley of the little rivulet and along the low
bench southwest of the fort, crossing the Rock Springs road and
striking, further on, diagonally, the Rawlins trail, where Crabb and his
fellows had found it and followed.

But all this took hours of time, and meanwhile, only half revived,
Nanette had been gently, pityingly borne away to a sorrowing woman's
home, for at last it was found, through the thick and lustrous hair,
that she, too, had been struck a harsh and cruel blow; that one reason,
probably, why she had been able to oppose no stouter resistance to so
slender a girl as Esther Dade was that she was already half dazed
through the stroke of some blunt, heavy weapon, wielded probably by him
she was risking all to save.

Meantime the major had been pursuing his investigations. Schmidt, the
soldier sentry in front of Moreau's door, a simple-hearted Teuton of
irreproachable character, tearfully protested against his incarceration.
He had obeyed his orders to the letter. The major himself had brought
the lady to the hospital and showed her in. The door that had been open,
permitting the sentry constant sight of his prisoner, had been closed by
the commanding officer himself. Therefore, it was not for him, a private
soldier, to presume to reopen it. The major said to the l