For within the week that followed the day of that drive and disaster the level-headed soldier in command of the department had been to Fort Wister; had held an official inspection and a personal investigation at Minneconjou; had interrogated and, it was whispered, instructed Captain Foster, with the result that, though deeply injured and properly incensed, that officer, while urging continued effort to bring to justice his unknown assailants, decided it was unwise to press further, for the present at least, his charges against Lieutenant Ray. Much to Ray's disgust, therefore, he was released from arrest without the full and entire clearance he had hoped for, and now, with the Canteen closed and no longer demanding his supervision, with little to do at the Exchange, still unfit for drill or soldier duty, with his soul raging and dissatisfied, his heart stirred anew with strange and turbulent emotion, and his brain in a whirl,--nervous, restless, sometimes sleepless the livelong night,--Sandy Ray had again taken to riding long hours to get away from himself,--from everybody, as he told his anxious, watchful, but silent mother. (How little did Priscilla dream how much that mother knew! How little did that mother know how much Priscilla dreamed!) And in Ray's avoidance of everything, everybody, he rode never to town, but ever to the west and often to the clump of cottonwoods opposite the mouth of that crooked ravine where Inez Dwight, with the look, the touch, the temptation of the unforgotten days at Manila and Nagasaki, had come again into his life, and whither Inez Dwight, decorously accompanied by her sheepdog of a maid, found means to drive, no matter which way she started, and there or about there, to meet him,--to see him four days out of the seven,--until the climax came.
For a man of philosophic temperament, one who seldom worried other people or himself, Colonel Stone had been having a nerve-racking time of it. He was troubled in the first place about the condition of affairs military in his big command, which the general himself had referred to as "a sad falling off," and which Stone saw no way under the law to correct. The number of men absent without leave, absent unaccounted for, probably in desertion, or absent "in the hands of the civil authorities," had increased alarmingly since the closing of the Canteen. "Skid" and his abominable community across the fords had been doing a thriving business, and were vastly enjoying the situation. Men by dozens who had been content, after their sharp drills or when the day's work was done, with mild and palatable beer, now sat sullenly about their barrack steps in the summer evenings, or, out of sheer disgust, wandered off by twos and threes (and a new footbridge erected by Skidmore), to spend their leisure hours and scanty cash over the reeking counters of the saloon, deeming themselves robbed of a right accorded every other wageworker throughout Christendom, and saying things of their Congress it wasn't safe for their officers even to think. They did not so much blame the women who had started the movement that spoiled their soldier homelife--how could women of the Fold be expected to know anything about the conditions on the frontier?--but, said our sergeants and corporals and sturdy men-at-arms, the soldier had a right to expect that Congress would look before it voted. Possibly had the soldiers, too, been voters their side of the case might have met some consideration; but, being politically on the same plane with "Indians not taxed," it was safe, at least, to similarly fix their social status and restrictions. Forbidden by the people he was sworn to serve, to take his temperate drink at home, but permitted by the same people to drink his fill of fiery stuff abroad, abroad the thirsty soldier went, and with him went many a man who had been content with mighty little, but resented it that he should be discriminated against, denied the right of the humblest citizen, and declared the only white man in America fit only to be ruled as is the red.