anxiously. "You started; and you are white, and
trembling."

"I--I don't know, colonel. Let us go home. It will be over in a minute.
Where are Alice and Mr. Jerrold? Call them, please. She must not be out
riding after dark."

But they were not in sight; and it was considerably after dark when they
reached the fort. Mr. Jerrold explained that his horse had picked up a
stone and he had had to walk him all the way.

IV.

There was no sleep for Captain Chester the rest of the night. He went
home, threw off his sword-belt, and seated himself in a big easy-chair
before his fireplace, deep in thought. Once or twice he arose and paced
restlessly up and down the room, as he had done in his excited talk with
Rollins some few hours before. Then he was simply angry and
argumentative,--or declamatory. Now he had settled down into a very
different frame of mind. He seemed awed,--stunned,--crushed. He had all
the bearing and mien of one who, having defiantly predicted a calamity,
was thunderstruck by the verification of his prophecy. In all his
determined arraignment of Mr. Jerrold, in all the harsh things he had
said and thought of him, he had never imagined any such depth of
scoundrelism as the revelations of the night foreshadowed. Chester
differed from many of his brotherhood: there was no room for rejoicing
in his heart that the worst he had ever said of Jerrold was unequal to
the apparent truth. He took no comfort to his soul that those who called
him cynical, crabbed, unjust, even malicious, would now be compelled to
admit he was right in his estimate. Like the best of us, Chester could
not ordinarily say "_Vade retro_" to the temptation to think, if not to
say, "Didn't I tell you so?" when in every-day affairs his oft-disputed
views were proved well founded. But in the face of such a catastrophe as
now appeared engulfing the fair fame of his regiment and the honor of
those whom his colonel held dear, Chester could feel only dismay and
grief. What was his duty in the light of the discoveries he had made? To
the best of his belief, he was the only man in the garrison who had
evidence of Jerrold's absence from his own quarters and of the presence
of _some one_ at _her_ window. He had taken prompt measures to prevent
its being suspected by others. He purposely sent his guards to search
along the cliff in the opposite direction while he went to Jerrold's
room and thence back to remove the tell-tale ladder. Should he tel