“Then why wasn’t he dismissed?” queried a young lieutenant.  “The law says he must be.”

“That’s right, Dolly:  pull your Ives and Benet on ’em, and show you know all about military law and courts-martial,” said the captain, crushingly.  “It’s one thing for a court to sentence, and another for the President to approve.  Hayne was dismissed, so far as a court could do it, but the President remitted the whole thing.”

“There was more to it than that, though, and you know it, Buxton,” said Blake.  “Neither the department commander nor General Sherman thought the evidence conclusive, and they said so,—­especially old Gray Fox.  And you ask any of these fellows here now whether they believe Hayne was really guilty, and I’ll bet you that eight out of ten will flunk at the question.”

“And yet they all cut him dead.  That’s prima facie evidence of what they think.”

“Cut be blowed!  By gad, if any man asked me to testify on oath as to where the cut lay, I should say he had cut them.  Did you see how he ignored Foster and Graham this morning?”

“I did; and I thought it damned ungentlemanly in him.  Those fellows did the proper thing, and he ought to have acknowledged it,” broke in a third officer.

“I’m not defending that point; the Lord knows he has done nothing to encourage civility with his own people; but there are two sides to every story, and I asked their adjutant last fall, when there was some talk of his company’s being sent here, what Hayne’s status was, and he told me.  There isn’t a squarer man or sounder soldier in the army than the adjutant of the Riflers; and he said that it was Hayne’s stubborn pride that more than anything else stood in the way of his restoration to social standing.  He had made it a rule that every one who was not for him was against him, and refused to admit any man to his society who would not first come to him of his own volition and say he believed him utterly innocent.  As that involved the necessity of their looking upon Rayner as either perjured or grossly and persistently mistaken, no one felt called upon to do it.  Guilty or innocent, he has lived the life of a Pariah ever since.”

“I wanted to open out to him, to-day,” said Captain Gregg, “but the moment I began to speak of his great kindness to our men he froze as stiff as Mulligan’s ear.  What was the use?  I simply couldn’t thaw an icicle.  What made him so effective in getting the frost out of them was his capacity for absorbing it into his own system.”

“Well, here, gentlemen,” said Buxton, impatiently, “we’ve got to face this thing sooner or later, and may as well do it now.  I know Rayner, and like him, and don’t believe he’s the kind of man to wilfully wrong another.  I don’t know Mr. Hayne, and Mr. Hayne apparently don’t want to know me. I think that where a man has been convicted of dishonorable—­disgraceful conduct and is cut by his whole regiment it is our business to back the regiment, not the man.  Now the question is, where shall we draw the line in this case?  It’s none of our funeral, as Blake says, but ordinarily it would be our duty to call upon this officer.  Shall we do it, now that he is in Coventry, or shall we leave him to his own devices?”