net him if he attempted to budge.

And all in vain, for, with the dawn of a bleak to-morrow, Private
Blenke, no one could begin to say how, had slipped by his possibly
drowsing guard and escaped. The prairie, the Minneconjou valley, the
trains, were fruitlessly searched. The agile prisoner had fled from the
wrath to come.

CHAPTER XXVII

EXEUNT OMNES

There is little left to tell. With the vanishing of the mysterious
Blenke, "the man of the mournful eyes," there came swift unfolding of
the pitiable scheme that, for a time, had set Minneconjou's nerves on
edge, bewildering almost every man from the colonel down, and bedeviling
most of the women. When one's own mother is ready to believe a man
guilty, small blame to the rest of her kind and to the man's best
friends that they should be of the same way of thinking. Moreover,
neither then nor thereafter did Sandy Ray consider himself an innocent
and injured person.

"If ever a fellow came within an ace of falling," said he to himself,
and later to his best friend, his father, "it was I; for I believed her
story--believed myself loved--believed she had been tricked into
throwing me over for Dwight, and that, now that he had thrown her over
because of it, and would have no more to do with her, she would soon be
free. Then our marriage could follow. A greater ass than I has never
lived, but I was sincere in my assininity."

Nor was Sandy Ray the ass he declared himself, for if ever that
exquisite, catlike creature, Inez, loved anybody besides herself, she
loved Sandy Ray, and was bent on winning him back, cost what it might.
She quickly saw that his love for her lay dormant, not dead. She reveled
in the joy of her probable power until, all on a sudden, one terrible
night there came to her the shock of seeing a face she believed long
since buried beneath the waves of the Pacific--that of the boy lover and
husband who wooed and won her inflammable heart nearly five years
earlier.

Blenke in a romantic epistle to Miss Sanford, Inez, through her lawyers,
and her latest dupe, Stanley Foster--whose resignation from the army
went eastward by the same train that bore him and that fair fugitive
from Minneconjou--and finally the impeccable Farrells, all gave versions
more or less veracious of that early marriage episode. But sifted down,
this much of truth was ascertained. The two were cousins, with the
vehement blood of the Antilles coursing in their veins. They loved,