“I remember him well.  We made the march from the Big Horn over to Battle Butte together, and he was a soldier one could not help remarking.  Of course I never had anything to say to him; but we heard he was an expert gambler when the troop was over there at Miners’ Delight.”

“Of course his testimony isn’t necessary.  Clancy and his wife between them have cleared you, after burying you alive five years.  But nothing but his story could explain his singular conduct,—­planning the whole robbery, executing it with all the skill of a professional jail-bird, deserting and covering several hundred miles with his plunder, then daring to go to the old fort, find Mrs. Clancy, and surrender every cent, the moment he heard of your trial.  What a fiend that woman was!  No wonder she drove Clancy to drink!”

“Will you send copies of her admission with Clancy’s affidavits?” asked Hayne.

“Here they are in full,” answered the major.  “The colonel talks of having them printed and strewn broadcast as warnings against ’snap judgment’ and too confident testimony in future.”

Divested of the legal encumbrances with which such documents are usually weighted, Clancy’s story ran substantially as follows: 

“I was sergeant in K troop, and Gower was in F. We had been stationed together six months or so when ordered out on the Indian campaign that summer.  I was dead-broke.  All my money was gone, and my wife kept bothering me for more.  I owed a lot of money around head-quarters, too, and Gower knew it, and sometimes asked me what I was going to do when we got back from the campaign.  We were not good friends, him and I. There was money dealings between us, and then there was talk about Mrs. Clancy fancying him too much.  The paymaster came up with a strong escort and paid off the boys late in October, just as the expedition was breaking up and going for home, and all the officers and men got four months’ pay.  There was Lieutenant Crane and twenty men of F troop out on a scout, but the lieutenant had left his pay-rolls with Captain Hull, and the men had all signed before they started, and so the captain he drew it all for them and put each man’s money in an envelope marked with his name, and the lieutenant’s too, and then crowded it all into some bigger envelopes.  I was there where I could see it all, and Gower was watching him close.  ‘It’s a big pile the captain’s got,’ says he.  ’I’d like to be a road-agent and nab him.’  When I told him it couldn’t be over eleven hundred dollars, he says, ’That’s only part.  He has his own pay, and six hundred dollars company fund, and a wad of greenbacks he’s been carryin’ around all summer.  It’s nigh on to four thousand dollars he’s got in his saddle-bags this day.’