Lieutenant Forrest. That you
may know I speak by the card, I purpose calling at your office at four
P.M. to-morrow, at which time, if you see fit, the gentleman
and those he may claim as his friends can hear the grounds on which I
base my demand. Let the laws which oppress the poor and friendless now
apply to the proud and powerful.

"'MAX ELMENDORF.'

"Now, Mr. Elmendorf, Mr. Starkey has been discharged, and has not been
reinstated. We'll hear him first, and then you."

"Very good, sir. Though I seem to be alone in the lions' den, I shall
not flinch from my duty even in the face of all this array that has been
carefully selected from among mine enemies."

"They are exactly as indicated by yourself," coldly answered the
colonel. "Send in Starkey."

And Starkey came,--Elmendorf's one weak victim among head-quarters
force,--and Starkey was in a sorry plight. He told his story ruefully:

"I supposed this gentleman was all right. I used to see him with the
officers. He was with them every day or two for hours. Then he made
himself pleasant and sociable, and used to get me to lunch, or treat to
drinks sometimes, and seemed to know everything that was going on. I
didn't know anything whatever about Mr. Forrest's affairs except what he
told me from time to time, and I believed what he told. Perhaps I did
let on I knew more. He got me to drinking, and God only knows how it all
came about. That reporter came to me and said that Mr. Elmendorf had
told him this and that and Captain Morris had told him more, and then he
got things up around the Lambert and around Forrest's lodgings, and
asked me if 'twasn't so that Forrest had been ordered off on account of
things happening there. Well, I suppose perhaps I did say that it was
so, but I never dreamed that he'd make what he did of it. And then when
the chief clerk caught me drunk and accused me of the whole thing I
broke down and owned up to everything, and I've been a--well, I've just
been that man's dupe."

The unhappy ex-clerk was withdrawn. Mr. Elmendorf cleared his throat in
readiness to speak. Forrest, with a smouldering fire in his eyes and
with compressed lips, sat gazing sternly at the ex-tutor. The others,
with faces indicative of various shades of contempt and indifference or
indignation, not unmingled with the curiosity which one feels in
studying some uncommon type of animal or man, silently awaited his
remarks. "I will begin by saying that my suspicions in this