their number, having ridden into Deadwood, came back with a several
days' old Cheyenne paper giving the fearful details of Gleason's death
and Ray's probable guilt. It was three days more before they met the
mail-stage fairly laden down with bags of letters for them. Stannard had
been almost sick, Truscott sad, silent, but incredulous. There had been
a difference between him and Billings, for the latter was inclined to
believe the story true, and Truscott said that he was prepared to hear
this from other men in the regiment but not from him. Eager as lovers
and husbands to get their mail, every man had dropped the letter he
happened to be reading when young Hunter, searching a later Cheyenne
paper, set up a whoop that made the pine-crested heights echo again and
again. Then waving his paper and dancing like a madman, the youngster
yelled at the top of his voice,--

"Ray's innocent! Ray's acquitted! 'Twas a deserter, Wolf, who did it!
He's confessed. _Now_, Crane. By heaven, swallow your words!
Wh-o-o-o-p!"

Officers and men, the whole regiment sprang to their feet and came
tearing to the spot, and such a scene of hand-shaking and shouting and
jubilee the Black Hills never knew before or since. It was easy enough
for the officers to hurry back to their letters from wives and children
or sweethearts, but for hours the men kept up their hurrah; Ray had been
their hero for years, and the affair of the July fight of Wayne's
command had simply intensified the feeling.

Naturally, the letters bearing the postmarks of latest dates were those
first opened. Fancy the faces of Stannard and Truscott as they read,
letter by letter, backward through that summer's record. Turner looked
as sad and anxious as ever; almost the first one he opened said, "If you
have not already seen and read those that precede this, please burn them
without reading. I was mistaken;" and Turner well knew that when his
wife got so far as to admit that she had been mistaken, it meant that in
some way she had been playing the mischief. He never read, therefore,
all her graphic details of Ray's mysterious flirtation with Mrs.
Truscott, or of the thrilling evidence in Mrs. Turner's possession of
his guilt. A good fellow was Turner, a loyal soldier and husband, who
loved his pretty and capricious better half, and deserved a still better
one.

That night when the first keen frosts of October made the camp-fires
doubly welcome, old Stannard and Jack went off