As the man most injured in the affair, I earnestly ask that no charges be preferred. Were we in civil life I should refuse to prosecute, and, if the case be brought before a court-martial it will probably fail--for lack of evidence. Very Respectfully, Your Obedient Servant, NEIL D. BLAKELY, 1st Lieut., ----th Cavalry. Now, Doty had been known to hold his tongue when a harmful story might be spread, but he could no more suppress his rejoicing over this than he could the impulse to put it in slang. "Say, aint this just a corker?" said this ingenuous youth, as he spread it on his desk for Graham's grimly gleaming eyes. Plume had read it in dull, apathetic, unseeing fashion. It was the morning after the Apache _emeute_. Plume had stared hard at his adjutant a moment, then, whipping up the sun hat that he had dropped on his desk, and merely saying, "I'll return--shortly," had sped to his darkened quarters and not for an hour had he reappeared. Then the first thing he asked for was that letter of Mr. Blakely's, which, this time, he read with lips compressed and twitching a bit at the corners. Then he called for a telegraph blank and sent a wire to intercept Byrne at the agency. "I shall turn over command to Wren at noon. I'm too ill for further duty," was all he said. Byrne read the rest between the lines. But Graham went straightway to the quarters of Captain Wren, a rough pencil copy of that most unusual paper in his hand. "R-robert Wren," said he, as he entered, unknocking and unannounced, "will ye listen to this? Nay, Angela, lass, don't go." When strongly moved, as we have seen, our doctor dropped to the borderland of dialect. In the dim light from the shaded windows he had not at first seen the girl. She was seated on a footstool, her hands on her father's knee, her fond face gazing up into his, and that strong, bony hand of his resting on her head and toying with the ribbon, the "snood," as he loved to call it, with which she bound her abundant tresses. At sound of the doctor's voice, Janet, ever apprehensive of ill, had come forth from the dining room, silver brush and towel in hand, and stood at the doorway, gazing austerely. She could not yet forgive her brother's friend his condemnation of her methods as concerned her brother's child. Angela, rising to her full height, stood with one hand on the back of her father's chair, the other began softly stroking the grizzled crop from his furrowed forehead.