Then rising and stepping aside, the long-suffering woman revealed the pallid, senseless face,--not of the little Indian maid, her shrinking charge and guest,--but of the niece she loved and had lived and lied for many and trying years--Nanette La Fleur, a long-lost sister's only child. So Blake knew what he was talking about that keen November morning among the pines at Bear Cliff. He had unearthed an almost forgotten legend of old Fort Laramie. But the amaze and discomfiture of the temporary post commander turned this night of thanksgiving, so far as he was concerned, into something purgatorial. The sight of his sentry, bound, gagged and bleeding,--the discovery of the ladder and of the escape of the prisoner, for whom he was accountable, had filled him with dismay, yet for the moment failed to stagger his indomitable self esteem. There had been a plot, of course, and the instant impulse of his soul was to fix the blame on others and to free himself. An Indian trick, of course, and who but the little Indian maid within the trader's gates could be the instrument! Through her, of course, the conspirators about the post had been enabled to act. She was the general's _protegee_, not his, and the general must shoulder the blame. Even when Flint saw Nanette, self convicted through her very garb and her presence at the scene of the final struggle,--even when assured it was she and not the little Ogalalla girl who had been caught in the act,--that the latter, in fact, had never left the trader's house, his disproportioned mind refused to grasp the situation. Nanette, he declared, with pallid face, "must have been made a victim." "Nothing could have been farther from her thoughts than complicity in the escape of Eagle Wing." "She had every reason to desire his restoration to health, strength and to the fostering care of the good and charitable body of Christian people interested in his behalf." "All this would be endangered by his attempt to rejoin the warriors on the warpath." The major ordered the instant arrest of the sentry stationed at the door of the hospital room--shut out by the major's own act from all possibility of seeing what was going on within. He ordered under arrest the corporal of the relief on post for presumable complicity, and, mindful of a famous case of Ethiopian skill then new in the public mind, demanded of Dr. Waller that he say in so many words that the gag and wrist thongs on the prostrate sentry had not been self applied. Waller impassively pointed to the huge lump at the base of the sufferer's skull, "Gag and bonds he might have so placed, after much assiduous practice," said he, "but no man living could hit himself such a blow at the back of the head."