Captain's train was five hours late and he knew a way to lure him out on the road. He hated him, too, he said, and "we were beginning to see why. He was so dead gone on the lady himself." He fixed the whole business, got a note to the captain, he said, the captain couldn't tell from her own writing, and it fetched him out just as was planned, and the rest was pretty much as the captain told it. Skelton at first didn't much care that an officer got credit for it all; Blenke had seen to that. Blenke seemed to hate Lieutenant Ray--though he was forever copying him--most as much as he hated Foster; but when Skelton got to the agency, got to know Ray, got knocked down at the pow-wow and rescued by Ray, got shot and left to roast to death at the agency, and was again rescued by Ray, Skelton made up his mind that he'd sooner go to Leavenworth for life, if he lived, or to hell if he didn't, than permit Mr. Ray to suffer another day in suspicion. It was Blenke who wore his dress at night and copied his very limp. It was Blenke that kept prowling about the major's, lallygagging with that French maid. It was high time Blenke himself was in limbo, and now they'd got him, they'd be wise to keep an eye on him. And so, with the case--the two cases--against Sandy Ray abruptly closed, the colonel, the surgeon and the adjutant, who had heard the confession, seemed also to think; for the sentry at the bedside of the mournful-eyed invalid received orders to bayonet him if he attempted to budge. And all in vain, for, with the dawn of a bleak to-morrow, Private Blenke, no one could begin to say how, had slipped by his possibly drowsing guard and escaped. The prairie, the Minneconjou valley, the trains, were fruitlessly searched. The agile prisoner had fled from the wrath to come. CHAPTER XXVII EXEUNT OMNES There is little left to tell. With the vanishing of the mysterious Blenke, "the man of the mournful eyes," there came swift unfolding of the pitiable scheme that, for a time, had set Minneconjou's nerves on edge, bewildering almost every man from the colonel down, and bedeviling most of the women. When one's own mother is ready to believe a man guilty, small blame to the rest of her kind and to the man's best friends that they should be of the same way of thinking. Moreover, neither then nor thereafter did Sandy Ray consider himself an innocent and injured person. "If ever a fellow came within an ace of falling," said he to himself, and later to his best friend, his father, "it was I; for I believed her story--believed myself loved--believed she had been tricked into throwing me over for Dwight, and that, now that he had thrown her over because of it, and would have no more to do with her, she would soon be free. Then our marriage could follow. A greater ass than I has never lived, but I was sincere in my assininity."