nd came out looking
worse. Old Whaling was swearing mad over a letter from Stannard and one
from the commanding officer of the --th, plainly telling him that if he
had been induced to take steps against Mr. Ray by any representations of
Mr. Gleason, he would find himself heavily involved; and now Gleason
plainly wanted to "crawfish," and to declare that Whaling had used as
facts what he had only suggested as possibilities. Whaling was also
notified that they proposed to ask the department commander to have
proceedings against Ray suspended until the return of the regiment from
the campaign, and meantime here was the young gentleman sick on his
hands at the post, and that blundering, bullet-headed quartermaster of
his had got him involved in another row. Mr. Blake had made an
application to department headquarters for a board of officers to
appraise the value of one public horse, which he, Lieutenant Blake,
desired to purchase; had written to a staff friend at Omaha a graphic
description of Dandy's and Ray's "devotion to each other," and the
decree of divorce which was passed by Colonel Whaling's order. The
quartermaster had meantime had Dandy out in the sun for two more days,
tied to the post, and had been notified by Mr. Blake that if he ever
spoke to him, except in the line of duty, he would kick him, and things
were in almost as eruptive a state at Russell in this blessed month of
August of the centennial year as they had been at old Sandy during the
Pelham _regime_, only--only who could this time say it was a woman at
the bottom of it?

And yet was it not Gleason's unrequited attentions to our heroine that
prompted much of the trouble? Fie on it for a foul suggestion! Is woman
to be held responsible for a row because more than one man falls in love
with her?

And yet again. She who has been so studiously kept in the background all
these dreary chapters has been coming to the fore on her own account. In
plain cavalry language, Miss Sanford has twice taken the bit in her
teeth and bolted. Gleason once discovered, anent the club-room, that she
had a temper. Mrs. Turner was the next to arrive at this conclusion. It
was the day after Mr. Ray's illness began. Mrs. Whaling was paying an
evening visit. Mrs. Turner had dropped in, as she often did where the
ladies were apt to gather, and, despite Mrs. Truscott's polite and
modest expression of her disagreement with Mrs. Whaling's views, that
amiable lady persisted in desca