A man with brains and a bank account had no right to live alone,
said Mrs. Sanders, she having a daughter of marriageable age, if only
moderately prepossessing. All this had the women to complain of in him
before the cataclysm that, for the time at least, had played havoc
with his good looks. All this he knew and bore with philosophic and
whimsical stoicism. But all this and more could not account for the
phenomenon of averted eyes and constrained, if not freezing, manner
when, in the dusk of the late autumn evening, issuing suddenly from
his quarters, he came face to face with a party of four young women
under escort of the post adjutant--Mrs. Bridger and Mrs. Truman
foremost of the four and first to receive his courteous, yet half
embarrassed, greeting. They had to stop for half a second, as they
later said, because really he confronted them, all unsuspected. But
the other two, Kate Sanders and Mina Westervelt, with bowed heads and
without a word, scurried by him and passed on down the line. Doty
explained hurriedly that they had been over to the post hospital to
inquire for Mullins and were due at the Sanders' now for music,
whereupon Blakely begged pardon for even the brief detention, and,
raising his cap, went on out to the sentry post of No. 4 to study the
dark and distant upheavals in the Red Rock country, where, almost
every night of late, the signal fires of the Apaches were reported.
Not until he was again alone did he realize that he had been almost
frigidly greeted by those who spoke at all. It set him to thinking.
Mrs. Plume was still confined to her room. The major had returned from
Prescott and, despite the fact that the regiment was afield and a
clash with the hostiles imminent, was packing up preparatory to a
move. Books, papers, and pictures were being stored in chests, big and
little, that he had had made for such emergencies. It was evident
that he was expecting orders for change of station or extended leave,
and they who went so far as to question the grave-faced soldier, who
seemed to have grown ten years older in the last ten days, had to be
content with the brief, guarded reply that Mrs. Plume had never been
well since she set foot in Arizona, and even though he returned, she
would not. He was taking her, he said, to San Francisco. Of this
unhappy woman's nocturnal expedition the others seldom spoke now and
only with bated breath. "Sleep-walking, of course!" said everybody, no
matter what everybody might think. But, now that Major Plume knew that
in her sleep his wife had wandered up the row to the very door--the
back door--of Mr. Blakely's quarters, was it not strange that he had
taken no pains to prevent a recurrence of so compromising an
excursion, for strange stories were afloat. Sentry No. 4 had heard and
told of a feminine voice, "somebody cryin' like" in the darkness of
midnight about Blakely's, and Norah Shaughnessy--returned to her
duties at the Trumans', yet worrying over the critical condition of
her trooper lover, and losing thereby much needed sleep--had gained
some new and startling information. One night she had heard, another
night she had dimly seen, a visitor received at Blakely's back door,
and that visitor a woman, with a shawl about her head. Norah told her
mistress, who very properly bade her never refer to it again to a
soul, and very promptly referred to it herself to several souls, one
of them Janet Wren. Janet, still virtuously averse to Blakely, laid
the story before her brother the very day he started on the warpath,
and Janet was startled to see that she was telling him no news
whatever. "Then, indeed," said she, "it is high time the major took
his wife away," and Wren sternly bade her hold her peace, she knew not
what she was saying! But, said Camp Sandy, who could it have been but
Mrs. Plume or, possibly, Elise? Once or twice in its checkered past
Camp Sandy had had its romance, its mystery, indeed its scandals, but
this was something that put in the shade all previous episodes; this
shook Sandy to its very foundation, and this, despite her brother's
prohibition, Janet Wren felt it her duty to detail in full to Angela.