is regiment, for go he would, as he meant to be a
sergeant inside of two years, and when she found that the sole
difference between sergeant and corporal in our blessedly democratic
service was simply half an inch or so more of stripe on his trousers,
and brought him no nearer the commission and little farther from the
rank and file, she marvelled that the Department of War could be so
slow to appreciate a soldier ready to do so much for so little. Go back
to "C" Troop he would and did, and was proud of it, and her husband
comforted her by saying "Bran" was a man at last.

But if the Eleventh heard but little of the Davieses for a time, they
had abundant news of Devers, and much comfort did he seem to find in
sending to them stacks of local papers, and in writing long,
argumentative letters in which he sought to convince his readers that he
was a wronged and injured man. When Trooper Howard came up for the trial
which resulted in his going in irons for a five years' tour in prison,
an effort was made to get Devers before the court as a witness, and a
_subpoena duces tecum_ was duly served upon him in his far distant
home within sight of the sounding sea, but it did not fetch him. Devers
explained that as a civilian he had no interest in the proceedings and
could not be required to obey the mandate of a purely military court, a
view in which the judiciary of the great republic, ever steadfast in the
principle that military must be subservient to the civil power,
virtually sustained him. It was perfectly competent for a court-martial
to summon a civilian witness, said the bench, but it had no recourse in
case the civilian treated both court and summons with contempt, and
Devers's fellow-citizens in the far East, headed by the editor of the
_Mooselemeguntic Mirror_, congratulated their returned hero on the
spirited and just rebuke he had administered to a satrapy which should
have no place among an enlightened people. Indeed, the _Mirror's_
interviews and editorials were both full of brilliant mendacity just
now. Devers's story was in every issue, more or less of it, and West
Point jealousy was the theme of many a paragraphic fling. Brilliant,
daring, conspicuous as had been Devers's services during the civil war
and on the wild frontier, he had never succeeded in winning recognition,
owing to the persistent calumnies of his seniors, who, graduates of the
great national charity school on the Hudson, were leagued to down any