"You asked for proof," said the other, with a grin, "and there you have it! Were I a rebel, you would have found naught but a roll of beggarly continentals; had there been more, I should have been an honest quaker, and neither rebel nor tory. Are you satisfied? I came here to seek you, and save my neck, which is in danger. There are men among the rebel officers that know me; and to be known, sir,--'by these pickers and stealers,' 'tis true!--'twere as good as a word to Jack Ketch, under the sign and seal of a State governor! Captain Gilbert, I come to volunteer my services under your command; and the sooner you introduce me to your rascals the better." "Rise, and behold them!" said the refugee, leaping to his feet; and friend Ephraim Patch, or Mr. Leonidas Sterling, as he had called himself, looking up, beheld to his extreme surprise, for he knew not how they got there, two men standing hard by, in green hunting shirts, with each a hatchet in his hand, as if ready to use them, and countenances grimly forbidding. "'The earth hath bubbles, as the water has!'" he cried,--"'Peas-blossom! Cobweb! Moth! and Mustard-seed!' 'I cry your worships' mercy!' Your hands, gentlemen: I am as honest a scoundrel as any of you, though somewhat more unfortunate." "Honest or false," said the refugee, giving a sign with his hand, on which the two instantly stepped from the den, and were concealed among the bushes, "it signifies but little to me. You are among friends, if you speak true; otherwise, among hangmen.--Your name is Poke?" "'That's he that was Othello'--a poor servant of the word, an expounder of the book, a sower of good seed on the way-side," said the Proteus, in the tones of the quondam Nehemiah. "You are Tapes, the pedler, caught stealing through the American lines at Morristown, and in good hopes of dying on an oak-tree?" "True for you, captain Gilbert!" cried the other, with a stare; "but where did you learn that? Hah! I see! the roguish refugee that assailed young Asgill's guards, while he was riding out on parole, and would have plucked him out of the bonds of Egypt, had not the fool gripped tight to his honour, very much as a drowning man hugs a ship's anchor, at the bottom of a river, and so remained in captivity.--What, captain! was that one of _your_ clap-traps?" "You are the impudent scoundrel who has been cutting throats, and laying them at honest men's doors? cried the other, without regarding the question. "Softly, captain--a mere matter of accident." "And, moreover," said the refugee, sternly, "you are the masking, blundering meddler, who has twice drawn the hue and cry after myself?" "Verily, so it appears," cried Sterling; "but now that we have met at last, we shall play no longer at cross-purposes." "What seek you here? Why have you returned to a place where your life is in danger?"