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ning to report his action to the post commander had so far departed from the strict letter of his duty as to confidentially inform the dazed young officer that the order had come by wire from St. Paul. It was not the colonel's doing. Sandy was in his room, "cooling off," as he said, when, with all his own troubles and others' deeds upon his head and clouding his honest old face, the post commander himself came in, took the mother's hand and led her to a seat. "It can't upset you more than it has me, my friend," said he. "I s'pose the explanation of it all is that they met somehow--accidentally, perhaps--renewed the quarrel; Sandy was possibly getting the worst of it and the men, whoever they were, couldn't stand that, for they worshiped him, and pitched in. There are few of our fellows, especially in the cavalry, that don't just love Sandy. There are some here that hate Foster," and then Stone stopped, astounded, confused, for Marion Ray, with rising color, interrupted: "Why, Colonel Stone, you speak as though you thought it possible that my son _could_ have been concerned in this affair!" For an instant the colonel struggled for words, his red face mottling in the violence of his emotion. "Why, how can I help it, Mrs. Ray, with all I have heard? But--but I'm more than glad you don't. What does he say?" "That he never dreamed of such a thing," was the brief answer, and Stone hitched half a dozen different ways in his chair. "Colonel Leale, Department Inspector, was on that train," said Stone slowly, "and reported Foster's story verbatim, I suppose, to department headquarters, where the arrest was ordered at once, and they demand that we apprehend the confederates. The general's away, and there isn't a man at headquarters that smelt powder in the Civil War--or they'd know confederates weren't so precious easy to apprehend. The men who might have been implicated all swear they were in town at the time and can prove an alibi; and unless Sandy will tell, who can?" "You still speak as though he could have had something to do with the assault, Colonel. I'll call him to speak for himself." So Sandy came down. Colonel and subaltern were left together, and Marion, with sore, wounded and anxious heart, stepped into her own little snuggery to look at the picture of her far-away husband (ah, how she missed him and needed him!) and of Maidie, her sweet and winsome daughter, now Mrs. Stuyvesant of Gotham, of Sandy in th
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