begging, buying or stealing whiskey, when Bill Hay's
private cellar held more than enough to fill the whole Sioux nation.
"Moreover," said Pink Marble, "they've got the run of the stables now
the old man's away, and there isn't a night some of those horses ain't
out." When Flint said that was something Mrs. Hay ought to know, Pink
Marble replied that was something Mrs. Hay did know, unless she refused
to believe the evidence of her own senses as well as his, and Pink
thought it high time our fellows in the field had recaptured Hay and
fetched him home. If it wasn't done mighty soon he, Pink, wouldn't be
answerable for what might happen at the post.

All the more anxious did this make Flint. He decided that the exigencies
of the case warranted his putting a sentry over Hay's stable, with
orders to permit no horse to be taken out except by an order from him,
and Crabb took him and showed him, two days later, the tracks of two
horses going and coming in the soft earth in front of a narrow side door
that led to the corral. Flint had this door padlocked at once and
Wilkins took the key, and that night was surprised by a note from Mrs.
Hay.

"The stablemen complain that the sentries will not let them take the
horses out even for water and exercise, which has never been the case
before," and Mrs. Hay begged that the restriction might be removed.
Indeed, if Major Flint would remove the sentry, she would assume all
responsibility for loss or damage. The men had been with Mr. Hay, she
said, for six years and never had been interfered with before, and they
were sensitive and hurt and would quit work, they said, if further
molested. Then there would be nobody to take their place and the stock
would suffer.

In point of fact, Mrs. Hay was pleading for the very men against whom
the other employes claimed to have warned her--these two halfbreeds who
had defied his sentries,--and Flint's anxieties materially increased. It
taxed all his stock of personal piety, and strengthened the belief he
was beginning to harbor, that Mrs. Hay had some use for the horses at
night--some sojourners in the neighborhood with whom she must
communicate, and who could they be but Sioux?

Then Mistress McGann, sound sleeper that she used to be, declared to the
temporary post commander, as he was, and temporary lodger as she
considered him, that things "was goin' on about the post she'd never
heard the likes of before, and that the meejor would never put