vindication at the hands
of a court, there were a dozen things to make it impracticable. To begin
with, the court had been ordered before it looked so black for Crook's
command and the Black Hills settlers, and all those infantry officers
who were on the original detail were now plodding up to Red Cloud. The
division was wellnigh stripped of everything but staff-officers, and if
a court _did_ meet, what a scoring it might give old Whaling and to his
own staff-officer, who took all that hearsay talk down around
Leavenworth and never gave Ray's friends a chance. It ended in the
general's impetuously directing that the court be dissolved, and that
Ray be ordered there post-haste. "I'll vindicate him!" he said.

And he did. Ray's pale, anxious face turned all sorts of colors when the
general jumped up from his chair and griped his hand like a vise, and
looked into his brave young eyes and said things to him that filled them
with tears and his soul with confusion. Ray had no words, but his heart
was full of a delight that none but soldiers know, and the lionizing he
got that day at division headquarters would have spoiled many another
fellow. The general could, indeed, "vindicate" him. He showed him the
draft of the letters sent to the regiment, and asked with a smile if he
didn't think _that_ would do as well as the "not guilty" of a court; and
that evening Ray took the westward train so as to stop over in Omaha one
night and see Nell, and then hurry on by the Union Pacific to Cheyenne.
His heart was bounding with hope, with pride, with gratitude and joy;
but through it all there was a sense of something strange and new to him
that tempered every feeling of exultation. He had been tried as by fire,
and humbled, softened, chastened by the fierceness of the flame. Even
bitterness and resentment seemed expelled from his soul. Ray was a
changed, a graver man. All that was truthful, gallant, loyal in his
nature was there yet, but the recklessness of the past was gone.

Many letters had come to him in the few days he had spent at Denver by
Rallston's sick-bed, and while Mrs. Stannard had frequently written to
tell him how they all were, and the colonel sent a courteously-worded
expression of his regret at the credence he had given to the statements
of a brother officer and what he termed the "misunderstandings" of the
summer, Ray was most touched at Warner's "solid" and earnest appeal to
be regarded as a friend and not as one of