the whole
robbery, executing it with all the skill of a professional jail-bird,
deserting and covering several hundred miles with his plunder, then
daring to go to the old fort, find Mrs. Clancy, and surrender every
cent, the moment he heard of your trial. What a fiend that woman was! No
wonder she drove Clancy to drink!"

"Will you send copies of her admission with Clancy's affidavits?" asked
Hayne.

"Here they are in full," answered the major. "The colonel talks of
having them printed and strewn broadcast as warnings against 'snap
judgment' and too confident testimony in future."

Divested of the legal encumbrances with which such documents are usually
weighted, Clancy's story ran substantially as follows:

"I was sergeant in K troop, and Gower was in F. We had been stationed
together six months or so when ordered out on the Indian campaign that
summer. I was dead-broke. All my money was gone, and my wife kept
bothering me for more. I owed a lot of money around head-quarters, too,
and Gower knew it, and sometimes asked me what I was going to do when we
got back from the campaign. We were not good friends, him and I. There
was money dealings between us, and then there was talk about Mrs. Clancy
fancying him too much. The paymaster came up with a strong escort and
paid off the boys late in October, just as the expedition was breaking
up and going for home, and all the officers and men got four months'
pay. There was Lieutenant Crane and twenty men of F troop out on a
scout, but the lieutenant had left his pay-rolls with Captain Hull, and
the men had all signed before they started, and so the captain he drew
it all for them and put each man's money in an envelope marked with his
name, and the lieutenant's too, and then crowded it all into some bigger
envelopes. I was there where I could see it all, and Gower was watching
him close. 'It's a big pile the captain's got,' says he. 'I'd like to be
a road-agent and nab him.' When I told him it couldn't be over eleven
hundred dollars, he says, 'That's only part. He has his own pay, and six
hundred dollars company fund, and a wad of greenbacks he's been carryin'
around all summer. It's nigh on to four thousand dollars he's got in his
saddle-bags this day.'

"And that night, instead of Lieutenant Crane's coming back, he sent word
he had found the trail of a big band of Indians, and the whole crowd
went in pursuit. There was four companies of infantry, under Captain
Rayner,