the
engineer lieutenant that the lady claimed to have received letters
proving that he was still in possession of the Nevins jewels while
sojourning at Fort Yuma, had endeavored to compromise the matter by the
tender of a check for two hundred dollars, which in her destitute
condition her sister had felt compelled to accept until she could have
legal advice, "and this," said Colonel Strain, "followed now by the
claim of this Mexican agent, has created such a scandal in the
general's eyes that you cannot too speedily take steps to assure him of
your innocence, which of course you should have no difficulty in doing
unless--unless--" and the colonel coughed dubiously.

For a moment Loring stood there like one in a daze. Good God! Geraldine
Allyn his accuser! The girl who had wronged him so bitterly before! The
girl whom he had sought to aid when he found her well-nigh destitute!
Gradually the whole force of the situation dawned upon him. With
Turnbull dead, the captain daft and Traynor telling the strange story of
his (Loring's) eagerness to examine the Escalante packet early on the
voyage, and now declaring that he had given it into Loring's keeping!
Who in the name of Heaven was left to speak for him? Loring had come a
stranger to this distant station. He had chosen to be sent at once to
duty in a desert land. He was personally as little known to his
superiors here at San Francisco as though they had never met. Even as
the men began about the steamship offices and on the streets and in the
hotels whither the Idaho's few passengers had told the tale, to speak of
Walter Loring as the man who really quelled the panic, if not a mutiny,
and saved the lives of a score of helpless men and women, that officer
stood accused before his comrades of the army of breach of trust, of
mean embezzlement, of low-down theft and trickery, and not a man could
he name to help to prove him innocent. Blake, to be sure, was at Yuma,
but what could he establish save that the stage had been attacked,
Loring left alone, and when the cavalry returned there lay the Engineer
apparently unconscious, the empty saddle-bag beside him. Blake had seen
no robbers. Blake suspected Sancho of every villainy, but could convict
him of none. Traynor, the purser, whether he believed or disbelieved his
own story that he had passed that packet down to Loring, could
truthfully declare that Loring had displayed most mysterious and
unaccountable interest in it. One talk