ade them any better if
I'd tried to explain them away, or amend them as I should have had the
right to do; so I let them go as they were.

"March cross-examined me himself, about the distance he was from the
guns when the orderly was supposed to come up; and the darkness of the
night; and the nature of the ground for muffling the sound of footsteps.
He didn't seem a bit disgusted or hurt with me because I could not do
better for his case. He had a real friendly look in his eyes whenever
they met mine; and I tell you, Peggy, I could have blubbed like a kid
when I thought of it later, after I knew what the verdict was.

"Once I saw him cross glances with Vandyke, and if you won't think I'm
getting sentimental on top of all the rest, I'll tell you I thought
March's look was like a sword. Vandyke was yellow and bloodshot as if
he'd had a bilious attack, and perhaps bile had been the trouble when he
went on sick report and the case had to be delayed for him.

"The findings were considered in closed court. And now you must take
this one bit of comfort to yourself, Peggy, in your trouble about your
friend Captain March: things might have gone a lot harder for him than
they did in such a serious case. Vandyke's accusation against him was
mighty bad, and there was some evidence to support it. March didn't seem
to use such weapons as he had to hit back with, quite as smartly as he
might have done, though that was, no doubt, in his determination to keep
your sister's name from coming into the affair. He did defend himself to
the extent of saying he'd tried to save the situation by firing blank
instead of shell; but that didn't help him much, for the whole point of
the accusation against him was that he had had no right to fire at all.
None of his witnesses could help him any more than I could, whereas
Vandyke had several who took their oath to seeing him in the auto with
his orderly, leaving old Fort Bliss at much about the time when March
said Johnson came to him with the second verbal order. March could have
been sentenced to imprisonment or chucked out of the army if the court
had believed in his giving the order to fire the guns on his own
responsibility out of sheer madness, or spite against Vandyke. As it
was, they accepted the theory that he had been hoaxed by some one
unknown, purporting to be the orderly of Major Vandyke, then acting as
colonel. Owing to the comparative darkness of the night (luckily there
wasn't a moon