sed
to be interviewed by reporters of the papers and couldn't be approached
by anybody else on the subject. Only two things were positively known.
Lieutenant Loring had received telegraphic notification from the Chief
of Engineers of his relief from duty in the department and his
assignment to similar work in the Department of the Platte, and it was
rumored, though it could not be confirmed, that the General had been
directed by telegraph to designate a staff officer to receipt to
Lieutenant Loring at once for the public property for which he was
accountable, in order that the latter officer might take an early
steamer for the Isthmus, as his services were urgently needed at his new
station. It was an open secret that the General considered himself
aggrieved by the action of the authorities at Washington and said so. He
had made no charge against Lieutenant Loring. He had merely called that
gentleman's attention to the very serious allegations laid at his door,
and this was true. On the other hand, people who had been permitted to
know anything about the matter, notably certain senior officers of the
Engineer Corps not under the General's orders, and one or two staff
department officers who, unhappily for themselves, were under his orders
and subject to his semi-occasional rebuke, now openly said that not one
allegation against Loring came from a reliable or respectable source,
and that it was an outrage to have held him even to inferential account
on the statement of such a cad as Escalante's agent, who hadn't been
near the office since the recovery of Captain Moreland, the insinuations
of Mr. Purser Traynor, now totally vanished, and the rumored aspersions
of a fair incognita, known only to Captain Petty, a man who had few
associates in the "line" or outside the limited circle of the General's
personal staff, and who was not too well liked even there.

And, as the revulsion of feeling set in, Petty set out for Yuma. "Where
there is so damned much smoke," said he, as it later transpired, "there
must be some fire," and the General had bidden him to go to Yuma, to
Gila Bend, to Guaymas, to the devil, if need be, and find out all the
facts. But the linesmen at Presidio and the jovial blades at Moreland's
elbow were loud in their laughing statement that if Petty were looking
for fire he could have found it here in abundance. Loring could have
given him more than he wanted.

Then came the order in the case of Captain Nevin