and F and K troops,--what was left of them,--that were ordered
to stay by the wagons and bring them safely down; and we started with
them over towards Battle Butte, keeping south of the way the regiment
had gone to follow Mr. Crane. And the very next day Captain Rayner got
orders to bring his battalion to the river and get on the boat, while
the wagons kept on down the bank with us to guard them. And Mr. Hayne
was acting quartermaster, and he stayed with us; and him and Captain
Hull was together a good deal. There was some trouble, we heard, because
Captain Rayner thought another officer should have been made
quartermaster and Mr. Hayne should have stayed with his company, and
they had some words; but Captain Hull gave Mr. Hayne a horse and seemed
to keep him with him; and that night, in sight of Battle Butte, the
steamboat was out of sight ahead when we went into camp, and I was
sergeant of the guard and had my fire near the captain's tent, and twice
in the evening Gower came to me and said now was the time to lay hands
on the money and skip. At last he says to me, 'You are flat-broke, and
they'll all be down on you when you get back to the post. No man in
America wants five hundred dollars more than you do. I'll give you five
hundred in one hour from now if you'll get the captain out of his tent
for half an hour.' Almost everybody was asleep then; the captain was,
and so was Mr. Hayne, and he went on to tell me how he could do it. He'd
been watching the captain. It made such a big bundle, did the money, in
all the separate envelopes that he had done it all up different,--made a
memorandum of the amount due each man, and packed the greenbacks all
together in one solid pile,--his own money, the lieutenant's, and the
men's,--done it up in paper and tied it firmly and put big blotches of
green sealing-wax on it and sealed them with the seal on his
watch-chain. Says Gower, 'You get the captain out, as I tell you, and
I'll slip right in, get the money, stuff some other paper with a few
ones and twos in the package; his seal, his watch, and everything is
there in the saddle-bags under his head, and I can reseal and replace it
in five minutes, and he'll never suspect the loss until the command all
gets together again next week. By that time I'll be three hundred miles
away. Everybody will say 'twas Gower that robbed him, and you with your
five hundred will never be suspected.' I asked him how could he expect
the captain to go