ient, so what was the use? He did not say, however,
that he and his fellows had recourse to them night after night.

It was three o'clock when the officers' families fairly got settled down
again and back to their beds, and the silence of night once more reigned
over Jackson Barracks. One would suppose that such a scene of terror and
excitement was enough, and that now the trembling, frightened women
might be allowed to sleep in peace; but it was not to be. Hardly had one
of their number closed her eyes, hardly had all the flickering lights,
save those at the hospital and guard-house, been downed again, when the
strained nerves of the occupants of the officers' quadrangle were jumped
into mad jangling once more and all the barracks aroused a second time,
and this, too, by a woman's shriek of horror.

Mrs. Conroy, a delicate, fragile little body, wife of a junior
lieutenant of infantry occupying a set of quarters in the same building
with, but at the opposite end from, Pierce and Waring, was found lying
senseless at the head of the gallery stairs.

When revived, amid tears and tremblings and incoherent exclamations she
declared that she had gone down to the big ice-chest on the ground-floor
to get some milk for her nervous and frightened child and was hurrying
noiselessly up the stairs again,--the only means of communication
between the first and second floors,--when, face to face, in front of
his door, she came upon Mr. Waring, or his ghost; that his eyes were
fixed and glassy; that he did not seem to see her even when he spoke,
for speak he did. His voice sounded like a moan of anguish, she said,
but the words were distinct: "Where is my knife? Who has taken my
knife?"

And then little Pierce, who had helped to raise and carry the stricken
woman to her room, suddenly darted out on the gallery and ran along to
the door he had closed four hours earlier. It was open. Striking a
match, he hurried through into the chamber beyond, and there, face
downward upon the bed, lay his friend and comrade Waring, moaning like
one in the delirium of fever.

CHAPTER X.

Lieutenant Reynolds was seated at his desk at department head-quarters
about nine o'clock that morning when an orderly in light-battery dress
dismounted at the banquette and came up the stairs three at a jump.
"Captain Cram's compliments, sir, and this is immediate," he reported,
as he held forth a note. Reynolds tore it open, read it hastily through,
then