injured and properly
incensed, that officer, while urging continued effort to bring to
justice his unknown assailants, decided it was unwise to press further,
for the present at least, his charges against Lieutenant Ray. Much to
Ray's disgust, therefore, he was released from arrest without the full
and entire clearance he had hoped for, and now, with the Canteen closed
and no longer demanding his supervision, with little to do at the
Exchange, still unfit for drill or soldier duty, with his soul raging
and dissatisfied, his heart stirred anew with strange and turbulent
emotion, and his brain in a whirl,--nervous, restless, sometimes
sleepless the livelong night,--Sandy Ray had again taken to riding long
hours to get away from himself,--from everybody, as he told his anxious,
watchful, but silent mother. (How little did Priscilla dream how much
that mother knew! How little did that mother know how much Priscilla
dreamed!) And in Ray's avoidance of everything, everybody, he rode never
to town, but ever to the west and often to the clump of cottonwoods
opposite the mouth of that crooked ravine where Inez Dwight, with the
look, the touch, the temptation of the unforgotten days at Manila and
Nagasaki, had come again into his life, and whither Inez Dwight,
decorously accompanied by her sheepdog of a maid, found means to drive,
no matter which way she started, and there or about there, to meet
him,--to see him four days out of the seven,--until the climax came.

CHAPTER XIX

AGAIN THE SALOON

For a man of philosophic temperament, one who seldom worried other
people or himself, Colonel Stone had been having a nerve-racking time of
it. He was troubled in the first place about the condition of affairs
military in his big command, which the general himself had referred to
as "a sad falling off," and which Stone saw no way under the law to
correct. The number of men absent without leave, absent unaccounted for,
probably in desertion, or absent "in the hands of the civil
authorities," had increased alarmingly since the closing of the Canteen.
"Skid" and his abominable community across the fords had been doing a
thriving business, and were vastly enjoying the situation. Men by dozens
who had been content, after their sharp drills or when the day's work
was done, with mild and palatable beer, now sat sullenly about their
barrack steps in the summer evenings, or, out of sheer disgust, wandered
off by twos and threes (and a