demand, no apparent limit to the supply.  Both were growing older, and now it became evident that Mrs. Clancy was the elder of the two, and that the artificiality of her charms could not stand the test of frontier life.  No longer sought as the belle of the soldiers’ ball-rooms, she aspired to leadership among their wives and families, and was accorded that pre-eminence rather than the fierce battle which was sure to follow any revolt.  She became avaricious,—­some said miserly,—­and Clancy miserable.  Then began the downward course.  He took to drink soon after his return from a long, hard summer’s campaign with the Indians.  He lost his sergeant’s stripes and went into the ranks.  There came a time when the new colonel forbade his re-enlistment in the cavalry regiment in which he had served so many a long year.  He had been a brave and devoted soldier.  He had a good friend in the infantry, he said, who wouldn’t go back on a poor fellow who took a drop too much at times, and, to the surprise of many soldiers,—­officers and men,—­he was brought to the recruiting officer one day, sober, soldierly, and trimly dressed, and Captain Rayner expressed his desire to have him enlisted for his company; and it was done.  Mrs. Clancy was accorded the quarters and rations of a laundress, as was then the custom, and for a time—­a very short time—­Clancy seemed on the road to promotion to his old grade.  The enemy tripped him, aided by the scoldings and abuse of his wife, and he never rallied.  Some work was found for him around the quartermaster’s shops which saved him from guard-duty or the guard-house.  The infantry—­officers and men—­seemed to feel for the poor, broken-down old fellow and to lay much of his woe to the door of his wife.  There was charity for his faults and sympathy for his sorrows, but at last it had come to this.  He was lying, sorely injured, in the hospital, and there were times when he was apparently delirious.  At such times, said Mrs. Clancy, she alone could manage him; and she urged that no other nurse could do more than excite or irritate him.  To the unspeakable grief of little Kate, she, too, was driven from the sufferer’s bedside and forbidden to come into the room except when her mother gave permission.  Clancy had originally been carried into the general ward with the other patients, but the hospital steward two days afterwards told the surgeon that the patient moaned and cried so at night that the other sick men could not sleep, and offered to give up a little room in his own part of the building.  The burly doctor looked surprised at this concession on the part of the steward, who was a man tenacious of every perquisite and one who had made much complaint about the crowded condition of the hospital wards and small rooms ever since the frozen soldiers had come in.  All the same the doctor asked for no explanation, but gladly availed himself of the steward’s offer.  Clancy was moved to this little room adjoining the steward’s quarters forthwith, and Mrs. Clancy was satisfied.