“Let that go by,” retorted Noah, sternly. “Your diplomacy shall not reach. Again I tell you, he who shall assail Mrs. Eaton with word or look, or who fails to please that lady with his conduct, replies to me. I wounded this one; I shall slay the next.” “What is this to be?” cried Pigeon-breast, appealing to me in a flutter of spiteful fright. “Is it that we have a bravo?” “A bravo whom you are like to encounter, sir,” I said, “unless you teach your tongue some prudence--you and your tribe.” “Sir, I would refuse to meet a bravo.” “Sir, you would meet the bravo or meet me.” Then came a rush of temper about my heart. I thought on poor Peg; and a great anger began to flame in me. I glowered on the tinsel Pigeon-breast; then I thrust towards him my huge bear-paw hands. Pigeon-breast considered them, and the hairy wrists like pistons, with a kind of interest of dismay. “Sir,” said I, “the first foul dog among you who shall so much as take the name of that innocent one upon his lips, I'll find him out, and with the ruth one grants to rattlesnakes, I'll kill him with these fingers.” And so ended that blood letting which was meant to tie the tongue of slander and in a measure did. “I shall leave it to you,” observed Noah as we came away, “to place this affair before the President in a right light. His is the only judgment whose favor I would seek, and that, particularly, for that his name is certain to figure in the story of this bicker whenever it is told. I would not have him think I had rashly put him in peril of criticism.” “There should be no alarm on that score,” I replied. “My word for it, the General will endorse with his full name every step we have taken.” On our return to the Indian Queen we found Rivera waiting, and a table spread in Noah's apartment as he had commanded. Rivera received the Spanish swords, still wrapped in the concealing cloak. He drew forth of its scabbard the blade which had armed Noah's hand; it still carried a stain or two of that Catron's blood, and Rivera's eye seemed to fire with a sleepy satisfaction while he looked on it. Then he turned his gaze on his patron in a manner of inquiry. “No, he will live,” said Noah, as though in reply to a query put by his protege; “it was not to kill him that we went across the way.” At this news, Rivera took the Spanish swords and withdrew; and all with the evident purpose of putting them in order against a next campaign. “I think,” said I, as Noah drew up to the table--for it would seem that his work had given his appetite an edge, not dulled it--“I think I shall hunt up our friend the General. There is slight chance of any being before me; and yet I would make sure to bring him the earliest word of what has chanced.”