make her share all
the punishment."

"Colonel," exclaimed Rayner, while beads of sweat stood out on his
forehead, "she is worse,--a thousand times worse! The woman is a fiend.
She is the devil in petticoats--and ingenuity. My God! sir, I have been
in torment for weeks past,--my poor wife and I. I have been criminally,
cowardly weak; but I did not know what to do,--where to turn,--how to
take it,--how to meet it. Let me tell you." And now great tears were
standing in his eyes and beginning to trickle down his cheeks. He dashed
them away. His lips were quivering, and he strode nervously up and down
the matted floor. "When you refused to left Clancy re-enlist in the
----th, two years after Battle Butte, he came to me and told me a story.
He, too, had declared, as I did, that he had seen the money-packages in
Hayne's hands; and he said the real reason he was kicked out of the
----th was because the officers and men took sides with Hayne and
thought he had sworn his reputation away. He begged me not to 'go back
on him' as his own regiment had, and I thought he was being persecuted
because he told the truth. God knows I fully believed Hayne guilty for
more than three years,--it is only within the last year or so I began to
have doubts; and so I took Clancy into B Company and soon made Mrs.
Clancy a laundress. But she made trouble for us all, and there was
something uncanny about them. She kept throwing out mysterious hints I
could not understand when rumors of them reached me; and at last came
the fire that burned them out, and then the stories of what Clancy had
said in his delirium; and then she came to my wife and told her a yarn
that--she swore to its truth, and nearly drove Mrs. Rayner wild with
anxiety. She swore that when Clancy got to drinking he imagined he had
seen _me_ take that money from Captain Hull's saddle-bags and replace
the sealed package: she said he was ready to swear that he and
Gower--the deserter--and two of our men, honorably discharged now and
living on ranches down in Nebraska, could all swear--would all swear--to
the same thing,--that I was the thief. 'Sure you know it couldn't be so,
ma'am; and yet he wants to go and tell Mr. Hayne,' she would say:
'there's the four of 'em would swear to it, though Gower's evidence
would be no good; but the two men could hurt the captain.' Her ingenuity
was devilish; for one of the men I had severely punished once in the
Black Hills, and both hated me and had swor