took to drink soon after his return from a long, hard summer's campaign
with the Indians. He lost his sergeant's stripes and went into the
ranks. There came a time when the new colonel forbade his re-enlistment
in the cavalry regiment in which he had served so many a long year. He
had been a brave and devoted soldier. He had a good friend in the
infantry, he said, who wouldn't go back on a poor fellow who took a drop
too much at times, and, to the surprise of many soldiers,--officers and
men,--he was brought to the recruiting officer one day, sober,
soldierly, and trimly dressed, and Captain Rayner expressed his desire
to have him enlisted for his company; and it was done. Mrs. Clancy was
accorded the quarters and rations of a laundress, as was then the
custom, and for a time--a very short time--Clancy seemed on the road to
promotion to his old grade. The enemy tripped him, aided by the
scoldings and abuse of his wife, and he never rallied. Some work was
found for him around the quartermaster's shops which saved him from
guard-duty or the guard-house. The infantry--officers and men--seemed to
feel for the poor, broken-down old fellow and to lay much of his woe to
the door of his wife. There was charity for his faults and sympathy for
his sorrows, but at last it had come to this. He was lying, sorely
injured, in the hospital, and there were times when he was apparently
delirious. At such times, said Mrs. Clancy, she alone could manage him;
and she urged that no other nurse could do more than excite or irritate
him. To the unspeakable grief of little Kate, she, too, was driven from
the sufferer's bedside and forbidden to come into the room except when
her mother gave permission. Clancy had originally been carried into the
general ward with the other patients, but the hospital steward two days
afterwards told the surgeon that the patient moaned and cried so at
night that the other sick men could not sleep, and offered to give up a
little room in his own part of the building. The burly doctor looked
surprised at this concession on the part of the steward, who was a man
tenacious of every perquisite and one who had made much complaint about
the crowded condition of the hospital wards and small rooms ever since
the frozen soldiers had come in. All the same the doctor asked for no
explanation, but gladly availed himself of the steward's offer. Clancy
was moved to this little room adjoining the steward's quarters
forthwith, and