s
like a gentleman."

"No one _does_ know anything more of the matter than was known at the
time of the court-martial five years ago," answered "the mole." "Of
course you have heard all about that; and my experience is that when a
body of officers and gentlemen find, after due deliberation on the
evidence, that another has been guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer
and a gentleman, the chances are a hundred to one he has been doing
something disreputable, to say the least."

"Then why wasn't he dismissed?" queried a young lieutenant. "The law
says he must be."

"That's right, Dolly: pull your Ives and Benet on 'em, and show you know
all about military law and courts-martial," said the captain,
crushingly. "It's one thing for a court to sentence, and another for the
President to approve. Hayne _was_ dismissed, so far as a court could do
it, but the President remitted the whole thing."

"There was more to it than that, though, and you know it, Buxton," said
Blake. "Neither the department commander nor General Sherman thought the
evidence conclusive, and they said so,--especially old Gray Fox. And you
ask any of these fellows here now whether they believe Hayne was really
guilty, and I'll bet you that eight out of ten will flunk at the
question."

"And yet they all cut him dead. That's _prima facie_ evidence of what
they think."

"Cut be blowed! By gad, if any man asked me to testify on oath as to
where the cut lay, I should say he had cut _them_. Did you see how he
ignored Foster and Graham this morning?"

"I did; and I thought it damned ungentlemanly in him. Those fellows did
the proper thing, and he ought to have acknowledged it," broke in a
third officer.

"I'm not defending _that_ point; the Lord knows he has done nothing to
encourage civility with his own people; but there are two sides to every
story, and I asked their adjutant last fall, when there was some talk
of his company's being sent here, what Hayne's status was, and he told
me. There isn't a squarer man or sounder soldier in the army than the
adjutant of the Riflers; and he said that it was Hayne's stubborn pride
that more than anything else stood in the way of his restoration to
social standing. He had made it a rule that every one who was not for
him was against him, and refused to admit any man to his society who
would not first come to him of his own volition and say he believed him
utterly innocent. As that involved the necessity of their