“But he should beware,” said the General. “Calhoun and his cohorts shall not steal a march on the old soldier. They must not go too far. A conspiracy to do treason exists, and Calhoun is at its head. But the mere conspiracy is not enough. Marshall lays it down how folk can not think treason, can not talk treason, and that treason to be treason must be acted. There must be the overt act; and though it be but the act of one, it attaches to every member of the conspiracy and becomes the treason of all. If one man so much as snap a South Carolina flint, that is an act to fall within the law, and the treason is the treason of Calhoun. I say, he should take heed for himself; whether he know it or no, the man walks among pitfalls.” “But you should be prepared,” I said. “We will go upon the work at once,” returned the General. “Winfield Scott shall proceed to Charleston; the fleet shall convene in the bay; Castle Pinckney shall have a hundred thousand stand of arms; and we will write to our old Indian fighters, Crockett and Coffee and Houston and Dale and Overton and the rest, to lie ready with one hundred thousand riflemen in Tennessee and North Carolina to overwhelm these rebellionists at the dropping of a handkerchief.” This converse, I recall, came off one afternoon when the General was in more healthful fettle than stood common during those days of fear for his life. Peg sat with us; indeed, it was news she gave us from a Charleston paper to bring down all this talk. Peg, silent yet interested, listened while the General laid out his purposes. “And if the Vice-President were taken for treason, what then?” asked Peg in a kind of innocence. “What would you do with him?” “He shall hang, child,” and the General spoke slowly and with a granite emphasis; “he shall hang as high as Haman! He shall be a lesson to traitors for all time.” It was then, and for the first time, as the General sank back spent, and in his weakness almost consumed of his own fires, there broke on me the whole peril of Calhoun. I knew the General too well to distrust the execution of his rope-and-gibbet threat. I was the more confirmed when that evening he would have me go about a score of letters ordering the readiness of those ships and arms and men he had outlined. A cordon of power was to be thrown about Calhoun and the ground beneath him mined for his destruction. Now if the General through this long summer grew to a better acquaintance with Peg, the same also might be told of me. And hardly a day was to dawn and die when in the unique turns and twists of her manifold nature she would not come upon me in a novel light. She was never to be twice the same, and my sluggish apprehension could scarce keep pace with the changes of her.