prevent it. I have strictly enjoined secrecy upon my--my informant, and
I desire you to regard this talk as confidential. Tell Weeks I
appreciate and sustain him in this caution and thank him for his
efforts to stifle any possible scandal. Poor Mac! The youngster would
be horror-stricken if he knew what secrets he had been blabbing."

"His troubles must have been weighing on his mind a long time," said
the doctor, "and yet I never suspected it. I don't know that I ever saw
a blither young fellow until about the time the finding of that board
of survey was announced. He didn't seem to expect that at all."

"Well,--neither did I. Of course, technically it had to go against him,
but we never dreamed it would result in stoppage of his pay."

"And yet his funds were all right, I'm told," said the doctor,
musingly. "One would suppose that if he had any tendencies that way
they would have cropped out when he had so much public money passing
through his hands."

"Tendencies what way, doctor? I don't follow you."

"Why, in the way these--these little thefts and his delirious
utterances would seem to indicate," said Bayard, hesitatingly.

Miller fairly sprang up from the rail on which he was leaning, his eyes
distended with wonderment and pain.

"In God's name, Bayard, what are you talking about?" he gasped.

"About this sad case of McLean's, major, as I supposed you were."

"You don't mean that your theory involves him? You don't mean it--it is
of himself, of his connection with these thefts, that he has been
telling in his delirium?"

"Why, Major Miller, I supposed of course you understood--I--I, of
course, accuse nobody, but of whom could he have been talking about but
himself? That was certainly my understanding of it."

For one moment the old major stood there looking into the
staff-officer's eyes,--amaze, consternation, distress, all mingled in
his florid, weather-beaten face. Then without a word he turned and
stumbled away down the steps and hurried from the gate. The trim,
spruce orderly, standing on the walk without, raised his gloved hand in
salute and stood attention as the commanding officer passed him, then
"fell in" ten paces behind and followed in his tracks. But for once in
his life the major neither saw nor returned a soldier's respectful
salutation.

XIV.

The fever had left him, and Randall McLean, very white and "peaked"
looking, was sitting propped up in bed and enjoying the wine-jell