the lady he desired to fascinate, but Miss Sanford was still looking
at the photographs and would not return his glance. Go he had to, and it
was plain to him that in striving to belittle Ray he had damaged his own
cause. It made him bitterer still as he strode through the darkness
down to the beacon-lights of the store. Gleason drank more and talked
more before he went to bed than was good for him; but no seed is so
easily sown as that of slander.

CHAPTER IX.

RAY TO THE FRONT.

It has been said that Major Stannard told his wife that he proposed
going down to camp, hunting up Mr. Wilkins, and getting from him
"flat-footed" the authority he had for his insinuations at Mr. Ray's
expense the day before the regiment marched for the Black Hills. The
major went as he proposed; but at the very moment he reached camp the
object of his search was unpacking Mrs. Wilkins's trunks up in the
garrison. Stannard left word with the officer of the day that he wanted
to see Mr. Wilkins on important business right after "retreat" (sunset)
roll-call; and Wilkins was quick to divine that the major had already
heard of his morning's mischief at the store. He stood in awe of the
battalion commander, and knew well that when it came to a face to face
encounter with him there could be no dodging. He must swallow his words
or give his authority. Wilkins, therefore, had important business of his
own or his able wife's devising which kept him from going to camp during
the evening, and Stannard, being only the major, could not order him
thither in the face of the colonel's permission to be absent. He trudged
back across the prairie in no amiable mood, therefore, and swore in
stalwart Anglo-Saxon to Captain Merrill that he would bring Wilkins to
the scratch if he had to go to his quarters to do it. They looked in at
the store, and Wilkins wasn't there, so together they walked up the row
until they came to the cottage into which the lares and penates of the
Wilkins family had so recently been carried, and Mrs. Wilkins herself
met them at the door. She was afraid of nobody, and had doubtless been
requested (he never directed) by her husband to see who was knocking.
Now Mrs. Wilkins was as fond of Major Stannard as her husband was afraid
of him. She liked his blunt, sturdy, unaffected ways, and many a time
and oft she had held him up to her submissive lord as the sort of
soldier he ought to be. She knew nothing of the affair at the store as