officer, and would
have been glad to see it carried out to this day; but Gleason was not
made of that stuff, and to the scandal of the regiment and the
incredulous mirth of Mr. Ray, Gleason pocketed the blow as complacently
as he did the money he had won from the Kentuckian by a trick which was
transparent to every looker-on, and would have been harmless with
Ray--had he been himself. Those were the rough days of the regiment's
campaign against the Apaches; officers and men were scattered in small
commands through the mountains; in the general and absorbing interest of
the chase and scout after a common foe there was no time to take up and
settle the affair as something affecting the credit of the entire corps;
many officers never heard of it at all until long afterwards, and then
it was too late; but to this day Gleason stood an unsparing, bitter, but
secret and treacherous enemy of the younger officer. He hated Ray with
the venom of a snake.

So far as the regiment was concerned, the enmity of a man of Gleason's
calibre could hardly be of consequence. Like Canker, he had come into
the --th from the "supernumerary list" at the time of the general
reorganization in '71. Scores of infantry officers left out of their
regiments by consolidation were saddled upon the cavalry and artillery,
and in many instances proved utterly out of their element in the mounted
service. All the cavalry regiments growled more or less at the enforced
addition to their list of "total commissioned," and the --th had not
been especially fortunate. Many a fine soldier and excellent comrade had
come into the cavalry in this way, and of them the --th had found a few;
but a dozen or more, valuable neither as soldiers nor comrades, had
drifted into the mounted service, and of these the regiment had, to say
the least, its full share. "All I've got to remark on the subject," said
old "Black Bill," the senior major at that eventful period,--"all I've
got to remark is simply this: those infantry fellows showed profound
discrimination in getting rid of their chaff, but they had no mercy on
us. When a man ain't good enough for a doughboy officer he ain't fit for
anything."

Now, it by no means resulted from inefficiency on their part that so
many of the transferred officers had left their own regiments. Many had
requested the move; many more were rendered supernumerary as being the
juniors of their grades; but there were others still who ranked well up