“Here is something to make you curse your kind,” cried he. Then, seeing my flowers: “How now! how now! and when was Mars a gardener and has the world turned girl! These should be thin days and bloodless, when the starkest saber that ever rode on my bridle hand--he whom the Creeks called the 'Big Death'--loiters with woman's wares and learns to twine a posy.” “They are for Peg,” said I, more nettled than I showed, for it struck me he talked a deal about nothing at all. “Oh, they are for Peg,” he repeated, his glance whimsical, yet narrow and intent; “they are for Peg!” Then just as I was warming to the brink of knowing what he would mean by that, he harked back suddenly to the letter in his clutch. “Come with me. Here is a word from that very Reverend Doctor Ely about your Peg, and we must concert steps to prove him the false defamer that he is.” CHAPTER VII--THE SECRETARY, SUAVE AS CREAM. And now there comes beneath my hand the hard portion of this history, the part which I most mislike and bear with least of patience. It is the record written by the smug, false Doctor Ely to the General, wherein with a particular past bearing, he piled up his scarlet charges. There came a dozen counts, and as if it were an indictment; and in them no slackness, but, instead, an evil confidence of statement plain and clear, as one after another he cast those stones at Peg. Nor shall his communication be set forth; I would not so offend against the whiteness of Peg's name, nor yet harass my own soul's roots by giving a line of it to types and presses. The more, since it was all a web of lies which sly rogues wove for the shallow hand of this Ely; and not enough of truth in it from top to bottom as should serve to make it respectable falsehood. Sufficient that there were stories with Washington and again New York as the theatres, and on these was based a brazen demand that Eaton be dismissed the cabinet and Peg whipped from among women wherever virtue had a name. As the General read these things aloud I sat biting my nail in the flaming impatience of my rage. “And now what think you?” said he, when he was done. “I think,” cried I, “that I shall ride at once for the caitiff ears of him.” The General, seeing my anger, turned to be mighty calm. It was a manner of ours that when I was for a rage he would go the other way; I, on my side and by way of requital, showed never so busy about methods for peace as when the General was for sounding Boots and Saddles. So, beholding me eating my fingers in a sort of blood-eagerness to come at the throat of that Ely, the General would be for craft; and to demand proof; and to go upon a litigation of the business among ourselves. “And now you know,” said the General, with a bitterness in his mouth like aloes, “why I fear preachers and your peace folk. Here is a false tissue against a girl as white as an angel.” “My soul for that!” I interjected.