tatement. He would not condescend to ask Webb a single question; but he
had called him aside that morning and said a quiet word.

"Should you ever need a solution of what may have seemed a mystery to
you, Webb, in what you mention having seen,--Mrs. Truscott and my friend
Ray, I mean,--you have simply to remember that the news of that massacre
over yonder has unnerved every woman in the army, and that Mrs. Truscott
is not now in a condition to bear any shock. I had asked Ray to go
regularly to my house."

He was incapable of doubting her. He would not doubt Ray, and yet--and
yet there was something about the matter he did not like. She had
written to him--three pages--that afternoon after it all occurred, and
had mentioned nothing of Ray's being there, nothing of her having been
agitated during his visit, nothing at all of it; and yet such a scene
had occurred. He could account for there being a scene, but he could not
reconcile himself to her utter silence upon the subject.

In his letter to Ray he, of course, said nothing of it. In his letter to
his wife he gently, lovingly, pointed out to her that it was not right
that he should be told by strangers of her being seen sobbing upon the
sofa when alone with Mr. Ray, and that she should make no allusion to a
matter that had struck them as so extraordinary. Could he have taken her
in his strong arms and used just those words in speaking of it with all
the grace of love and trust and tenderness accenting every syllable, she
would never have mistaken the mood in which he wrote; but who that loves
has not marked the wide difference between such words written and
spoken? When the letter came it cut Grace to the heart, and it was the
last letter to reach her in one whole month. The next had to come way
around by the Yellowstone. Was it likely that in that intervening month
she should care to see much of Ray?

All over the Northwest that column went marching and chasing after the
now scattered bands of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: always on the
trail, always pushing ahead. From the Tongue to the Rosebud; then over
to the Powder; then up to the Yellowstone; then, while Miles went across
after the fleeing Uncapapas and their wily old rascal of a leader, the
Gray Fox gave his ragged followers a few days in which to bait their
horses and patch their boots and breeches; then on he led them after the
Ogallallas and Brules, far across the Little Missouri, over to Heart
River, wher