“Colonel,” exclaimed Rayner, while beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, “she is worse,—­a thousand times worse!  The woman is a fiend.  She is the devil in petticoats—­and ingenuity.  My God! sir, I have been in torment for weeks past,—­my poor wife and I. I have been criminally, cowardly weak; but I did not know what to do,—­where to turn,—­how to take it,—­how to meet it.  Let me tell you.”  And now great tears were standing in his eyes and beginning to trickle down his cheeks.  He dashed them away.  His lips were quivering, and he strode nervously up and down the matted floor.  “When you refused to left Clancy re-enlist in the ——­th, two years after Battle Butte, he came to me and told me a story.  He, too, had declared, as I did, that he had seen the money-packages in Hayne’s hands; and he said the real reason he was kicked out of the ——­th was because the officers and men took sides with Hayne and thought he had sworn his reputation away.  He begged me not to ’go back on him’ as his own regiment had, and I thought he was being persecuted because he told the truth.  God knows I fully believed Hayne guilty for more than three years,—­it is only within the last year or so I began to have doubts; and so I took Clancy into B Company and soon made Mrs. Clancy a laundress.  But she made trouble for us all, and there was something uncanny about them.  She kept throwing out mysterious hints I could not understand when rumors of them reached me; and at last came the fire that burned them out, and then the stories of what Clancy had said in his delirium; and then she came to my wife and told her a yarn that—­she swore to its truth, and nearly drove Mrs. Rayner wild with anxiety.  She swore that when Clancy got to drinking he imagined he had seen me take that money from Captain Hull’s saddle-bags and replace the sealed package:  she said he was ready to swear that he and Gower—­the deserter—­and two of our men, honorably discharged now and living on ranches down in Nebraska, could all swear—­would all swear—­to the same thing,—­that I was the thief.  ’Sure you know it couldn’t be so, ma’am; and yet he wants to go and tell Mr. Hayne,’ she would say:  ’there’s the four of ’em would swear to it, though Gower’s evidence would be no good; but the two men could hurt the captain.’  Her ingenuity was devilish; for one of the men I had severely punished once in the Black Hills, and both hated me and had sworn they would get even with me yet.  God help me, colonel! seeing every day the growing conviction that Hayne was innocent, that somebody else must be guilty, I thought, what if this man should, in drunken gratitude to Hayne for saving his life, go to him and tell him this story, then back it up before the officials and call in these two others?  I was weak, but it appalled me.  I determined to get him out of the way of such a possibility.  I got his discharge, and meantime strove to prevent his drinking or going near Hayne. She knew the