to be earlier and better known as
Sackett and as a former member of the Seventh Cavalry, from which
regiment he had parted company without the formality of either transfer
or discharge.

Murray was a man worth his keep, as military records of misdemeanors
went, and a sore-hearted fellow was the sergeant of the guard, held
responsible for the wholesale escape. And yet it was not so much the
sergeant's fault. The evening had come on dark, damp, and dripping.
Gas-lamps and barrack-lanterns were lighted before the sunset gun. The
sergeant himself and several of the guard had been called inside to the
prison room by the commanding officer and his staff. There was a maze of
brick and wooden buildings in front of the guard-house, and a perfect
tangle of dense shrubbery only fifty yards away to the west. It was into
this that most of the fugitives dived and were instantly lost to sight,
while others had doubled behind the guard-house and rushed into an
alley-way that passed in rear of the club and a row of officers'
quarters.

Some of them apparently had taken refuge in the cellars or wood- and
coal-sheds until thick darkness came down, and others had actually dared
to enter the quarters of Lieutenant Ray, for the back door was found
wide open, the sideboard, wherein had been kept some choice old Kentucky
whiskey produced only on special occasions, had been forced, and the
half-emptied demijohn and some glasses stood on the table in a pool of
sloppy water.

But what was worse, the lieutenant's desk in the front room, securely
locked when he went to town, had been burst open with a chisel, and Mr.
Ray had declined to say how much he had lost. Indeed, he did not fully
know.

"Too busy to come in," was the message he had sent his mother the
morning after the discovery, and yet all that morning he remained about
his quarters after one brief interview with the perturbed and
exasperated post commander, ransacking desks, drawers, and trunks in the
vain hope that he might find in them some of the missing property, for
little by little the realization was forced upon him that his loss would
sum up several hundreds--all through his own neglect and through
disregard of his father's earnest counsel.

Only three days before the lieutenant commanding his troop had been sent
to Oregon and Washington on duty connected with the mustering of
volunteers,--their captain was a field officer of one of the regiments
of his native State,--and,