there would be no refuge for me but the
grave."

"Now," said Mrs. Cranston, "something besides the bedside is delirious
in that case. No wonder the poor fellow is picking up so slowly."

"Well, wait a little," responded her conservative lord and master.
"Seems to me a man ought to rejoice in knowing that the arms of lovely
woman are outstretched in eagerness to enfold him. Now, if I were
he----"

"Yes, if you were he I've no doubt you'd be off to Urbana by first
train; but this young man has some sense in his head" (here Cranston
began to finger his own skull tentatively), "and in losing his freedom
hasn't entirely parted with his wits."

"Was that--my predicament?" asked Cranston, looking plaintively up.

"Well, at least I have to do your thinking for you, and what you have to
do is help him here. Have you had any talk with him about--about what
Captain Truman and Mr. Gray wrote?"

"Certainly not, Meg," answered Cranston, becoming grave at once, "and I
do not mean to until he is well enough to hear it."

"Well, the more I know of him the more I know it's utterly untrue.
Hasn't anything been heard yet of Sergeant McGrath?"

"Not a word. Even friendly Indians say they haven't an idea what could
have become of him." And Cranston's face was both anxious and troubled.

The matter was indeed one to give him deep concern. The massacre of the
little detachment from Warren's battalion late in September--all of them
members of Devers's troop--had brought down sharp and deserved
criticism, and there was every prospect that the matter would be
officially investigated just as soon as the department commander could
turn his attention from the rounding up of the hostile band still at
large. Meantime, between Warren and his senior troop commander, Captain
Devers, strained relations existed,--the former holding to the theory
that the responsibility for the disaster lay with Devers and no one
else, the latter volubly, plausibly, incessantly protesting against the
imputation as utterly unjust, indeed, as utterly outrageous, and moving
heaven and earth to unload the entire blame on the shoulders of the
absent and defenceless.

Now, as a rule this is an easy matter, almost as easy in the army as out
of it, and had his accuser been any other captain in the entire field
column, poor Davies might indeed have been prejudged; but with Devers it
was different. His idiosyncrasies were notorious. His whole mental and
moral fabric