"Oh, please forget this morning!" he pleaded. "But I was rude to you; I threatened to have you thrown out of the house; and you had come to do us a favor." "Miss Dangerfield, I can not lie to you. You are one of the most difficult persons to lie to that I have ever met. I didn't come to Raleigh just to warn your father that his life was threatened. I can't lie to you about that--" "Then you _are_ a spy?" and Miss Dangerfield started forward in her chair so suddenly that Ardmore dropped his hat. "No! I am not a spy! I don't care anything about your father. I never heard of him until yesterday." "Well, I like that!" ejaculated Miss Dangerfield. "Oh, I mean that I wasn't interested in him--why should I be? I don't know anything about politics." "Neither does father. That's why he's governor. If he were a politician he'd be a senator. But"--and she folded her hands and eyed him searchingly--"here's a lot of telegrams from the sheriff of Dilwell County about that jug. How on earth did you come to get it?" "Lied, of course. I allowed them to think I was intimately associated in business with the governor, and they began passing me jugs. Then the man who gave the jug with that message in the cork got suspicious, and I dropped the buttermilk jug back to him." "You traded buttermilk for moonshine?" "I shouldn't exactly call it moonshine. It's more like dynamite than anything else. I've written a reply to the note and put it back in the cork, and I'm going to return it to Kildare." "What answer did you make to that infamous effort to intimidate my father?" demanded Miss Dangerfield. "I told the Appleweight gang that they are a lot of cowards, and that the governor will have them all in jail or hanged within ten days." "Splendid! Perfectly _splendid_! Did you really say that?" "What else could I do? I knew that that's what the governor would say--he'd have to say it--so I thought I'd save him the trouble." "Where's the jug now, Mr. Ardmore?" "In my room at the hotel. The gang must have somebody on guard here. A gentleman who seemed to be one of them called on me this morning, demanding the jug; and if he's the man I think he is, he's stolen the little brown jug from my room in the hotel by this time."