The good doctor remains by the barge, while Hamilton, with friend Pendleton, ascends the rocky, shelving, shingly twenty feet to the place of meeting. They find Aaron and Van Ness awaiting them. Aaron touches his hat stiffly, and walks to the far end of the narrow grassy shelf. Seconds Pendleton and Van Ness toss a dollar piece. Pendleton wins word and choice of position. Ten paces are stepped off. Second Pendleton places his man at the up-the-river end of the six-foot grassy shelf. Aaron, pistol in hand, is given the other end. The word is to be: “Present!--one--two--three--stop!” As the two stand in position, Aaron is confident, deadly, implacable; Hamilton looks the man already lost. Seconds Pendleton and Van Ness retire out of range. “Gentlemen, are you ready?”. “Ready!” says Aaron. “Ready!” says Hamilton. There is a pause, heavy with death. Then comes: “Present!-------” There is a flash and a roar!--a double flash, a double roar! The smoke curls, the rocks echo! Hamilton, with a stifled moan, reels, clutches at nothing, and pitches forward on his face--shot through and through. The Hamilton lead, wild and high, cuts a twig above Aaron’s head. Aaron takes a step toward his slain foe, and looks long and deep, like a man drinking. Van Ness comes up; Aaron tosses him the pistol, as folk toss aside a tool when the work is done--well done. Then he walks down to his barge, and shoves away for Richmond Hill, whose green peaceful cedars are smiling just across the river. “It was worth the price, Van Ness,” says Aaron. “The taste of that immortal vengeance will never perish on my lips, nor its fragrance die out in my heart.” CHAPTER XVII--AARON I, EMPEROR OF MEXICO AARON sits placidly serene at Richmond Hill. Over his wine and his cigar, he reduces those dreams of empire to ink and paper. He maps out his design as architects draw plans and specifications for a house. His friends call--Van Ness, the stubborn Swart-wout, the Irvings, Peter and Washington. Outside the serene four walls of Richmond Hill there goes up a prodigious hubbub of mourning--demonstrative if not deeply sincere. Hamilton, broken as a pillar of politics, was still a pillar of fashion. Was he not a Schuyler by adoption? Had he not a holding in Trinity? Therefore, come folk of powdered hair and silken hose, who deem it an opportunity to prove themselves of the town’s Vere de Veres. There dwells fashionable advantage in tear-shedding at the going out of an illustrious name. Such tear-shedding provides the noble inference that the illustrious one was “of us.” Alive to this, those of would-be fashion lapse into sackcloth and profound ashes, the sackcloth silk and the ashes ashes of roses. Also they arrange a public funeral at Trinity, and ask Gouverneur Morris, the local Mark Antony, to deliver an oration.