pressing entire
willingness to receipt for any funds the accused might offer, would
promise nothing whatever in return. That Nevins should be charged with
desertion and breach of arrest the accused officer regarded as of small
importance. He was merely going to Tucson fast as he could to get from
business associates, as he termed them, the money deposited with them,
and owed to him, and this must also excuse his having borrowed the
major's best horse. His friends in congress would square all that for
him, even if the court should prove obdurate. That grave charges should
have followed him from a former sphere of operations, that his record,
while retained in the volunteer service until the spring of '66 and
assigned to some mysterious bureau functions in the South, should all
have been ventilated and made part and parcel of the charges, that it
should be shown that he, as a newly commissioned officer of the army,
had made the journey from New Orleans to the Isthmus and thence to San
Francisco with men whom he knew to be deserters from commands stationed
in the Crescent City, that he should have gambled with them and
associated with them and brought one of them all the way with him to
Yuma and concealed from the military authorities his knowledge of their
crime, that it should be proved he was a professional "card sharp,"
expert manipulator and blackleg he never had contemplated as even
possible, and yet, with calm and relentless deliberation "that
cold-blooded, merciless martinet of a West Pointer," as he referred to
the judge advocate at an early stage in the proceedings, had laid proof
after proof before the court, and left the case of the defense at the
last without a leg to stand on. And then Nevins dropped the debonair and
donned the abject, for the one friend or adviser left to him in the
crowded camp, an officer who said he always took the side of the under
dog in a fight, had told him that in its present temper that court, with
old Turnbull as one of its leaders, would surely sentence him to a term
of years at Alcatraz as well as to dismissal from the military service
of the United States. Dismissal he expected, but cared little for that.
He had money and valuables more than enough to begin life on anywhere,
and the pickings of his accustomed trade were all too scant in Arizona.
He needed a broader field, and a crowding population for the proper
exercise of his talents; and the uniform of the officer, after all, h