“I must go to Howard,” said Mrs. Varney; “this excitement is killing him; I am afraid he will hardly survive the night. Caroline is with him now.” “Very well, mother,” said Edith, going slowly up the now deserted room and standing in the window, looking out into the night, thinking her strange, appalling thoughts. They would convict him, shoot him, there was no hope. What had he said? He was not ashamed of his work. It was the highest duty and involved the highest and noblest sacrifice, because it made the greatest demand; and they would shoot him like a mad dog. “Oh, God!” she whispered; “if some bullet would only find my heart as well.” CHAPTER XIX THE DRUMHEAD COURT-MARTIAL It so happened that the soldiers who had thrust old Jonas back in his closet, whence they had taken him a short time before, in their haste, had failed to lock the door upon him. The negro, who had listened for the click of the key in the lock, had at once known of their carelessness. So soon as they had withdrawn from the room, and their search took them to other parts of the house, he had opened the door cautiously and had made his way toward the hall by the drawing-room, which he felt instinctively was the place where the exciting events of the night would soon culminate. Thorne’s entry and the circumstances of his apprehension had been so engrossing that no one had given a thought to Jonas, or to any other part of the house, for that matter, and he had been able to see everything through the hangings. He was a quick-witted old negro, and he knew, of course, that there would be but one verdict given by such a court-martial as had assembled. Now, the men who composed the court would of necessity be detailed to carry out their own sentence. The long room was filled with stacks of guns. Every soldier, even those under the command of Corporal Matson in Arrelsford’s Department, had gone to the court-martial. There was nothing else of interest to attract them in the house. Every gun was there in that room, unguarded. A recent capture of a battalion of Federal riflemen had put the Confederates into possession of a few hundred breech-loading weapons, not of the latest and most approved pattern, for the cartridges in these guns were in cardboard shells, but still better than any the South possessed. These rifles had been distributed to some of the companies in garrison at Richmond, and it so happened that the men of the Secret Service squad and the Provost Guard had received most of them. Every gun in the stacks was of this pattern. In his earlier days, Jonas had been his young master’s personal attendant, his body-servant, and as such he had often gone hunting with him. During the war he had frequently visited him in camp, charged with messages of one sort or another, and he knew all about weapons.