self-inflicted though it was, quite as much as she
could bear, was confronted with another. Blenke, who had been nervous,
excitable, almost ill on the very few occasions she had seen him since
his return; Blenke, who had promised to confide to her, his
benefactress, the cause of his worries, the story of his woes; Blenke,
whose mournful eyes had blazed with a fine fury when told by Hogan, who
couldn't abide him, of Miss Sanford's salutation from the window of the
reoccupied rookery at the ford; Blenke, who could never set foot on the
floor of the Canteen, turned up missing one night at check rollcall, two
hours after taps, was suddenly and most unexpectedly stumbled on by the
officer of the day making his rounds at 3 A. M.: not, as might have
happened to men of less indomitable virtue, coming from the direction of
Skidmore's, but almost at the very opposite end of the garrison, at the
rear gateway of the field officers' quarters, No. 2, so obviously
obfuscated, so utterly limp, that he could give no account of himself
whatever, was wheeled to the guard-house in a police cart and dumped on
the slanting bunk of the prison room with a baker's dozen of the
"Skidmore guard" sleeping off their unaccustomed drunk.

CHAPTER XVI

MY LADY'S MAID

It proved the last pound that broke the back of Priscilla's stubborn
resistance. Men and women who had found much to condemn in Miss Sanford,
who had disseminated and discussed the tale of her correspondence with
the _Banner_ and the talk that followed, who had heard with indignation
that it was after Dwight's conference with Miss Sanford that he so
furiously punished little Jim (for, as we know, Mrs. Thornton had
assured everybody that so far as _she_ was concerned she had done her
utmost to make the major understand that Jimmy never did it on purpose),
who had felt the lash of her over-candid comment on their social or
parental shortcomings, now had no little malicious merriment to add to
the deservedly hard things they had said of her. For a fortnight,
probably, Miss Sanford had been the most unpopular woman that
Minneconjou's oldest inhabitant could name; but the men and women who
saw her as one after another she faced the results of her most confident
efforts, began to feel for the lonely, sorrowing maiden a respect and
sympathy denied her before. It was plain that Priscilla was well-nigh
crushed, and "when women weep" and are desolate and hopeless resentment
turns to pi