And even Graham did not dream how sorely Blakely had been hit. Nor
could he account for the access of nervous irritability that possessed
his patient all the livelong day, while waiting, as they all were, for
the coming of Colonel Byrne. Mrs. Sanders declared to Mrs. Graham her
private impression that he was on the verge of prostration, although,
making an effort, Blakely had appeared at breakfast after an early
morning walk, had been most courteous, gentle, and attentive to her
and to her wholesome, if not actually homely, Kate. How the mother's
heart yearned over that sweet-natured, sallow-faced child! But after
breakfast Blakely had wandered off again and was out on the _mesa_,
peering through a pair of borrowed glasses over the dreary eastward
landscape and up and down the deep valley. "How oddly are we
constituted!" said Mrs. Sanders. "If I only had his money, I'd never
be wearing my heart out in this desert land." She was not the only
army wife and mother that should have married a stockbroker--anything
rather than a soldier.
The whole post knew by noon that Byrne was coming, and waited with
feverish impatience. Byrne was the power that would put an end to the
doubts and distractions, decide who stabbed Pat Mullins, who set fire
to the "beetle shop," where Epsom Downs had gone, and could even
settle, possibly, the long-doubtful question, "Who struck Billy
Patterson?" Sandy believed in Byrne as it did in no one since the days
of General Crook.
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