"No, Anderson. No! It was not you they were seeking. It is I, I tell you. Reed has been watching me like a sharpshooter from the day I arrived. He has been the author of the rumors which you have heard about town, and he would risk his life to be enabled to establish a serious charge against me. I am sure of it. Reed is behind this; Reed and the City Council." "It was a nimble form----" "Did you say you thought you hit him?" he asked nervously, seeking some source of comfort and assurance. "As I live, I hit him," Anderson promised him. "Else I would have discovered him in the act of swimming. He is in the bottom of the river." "That's good, damn him. Oh! If it were but Reed himself! He haunts me." "He would not haunt you did you but remove yourself from here," volunteered Peggy. "I know it. I know it," he repeated. "But how can I?" "I suggested one avenue to you," proposed Anderson. "Which?" He awaited the answer. "Via England." His face glared with a livid red. He brought his fist high above his head. "By heavens!" he roared. "I won't hear that again. I won't listen to it, I tell you. I'm afraid to do it. I cannot do it. I cannot." He shook his head as he slowly repeated the words. "Pardon me," Anderson pleaded, "I intended no harm. I apologize most sincerely for my impertinence. It will not happen again, I assure you." "That will do. Drop it at that." "The vessel will be ready next week? The meeting, then, can take place a week from Thursday." "Undoubtedly." "You will assure me of your interest?" He was on the point of going. Though he had conquered, still, he did not know that he had conquered. He believed, as he turned and faced his friend for the last time in Mount Pleasant, that his mind was fully made up and that he had decided for all time in favor of the cause, at the sacrifice of himself. "I shall do what I can," Arnold whispered, "but no more." He parted from them at the threshold. CHAPTER VI I "I have always contended, Griff, that a bigot and a patriot are incompatible," remarked Stephen as he sat on the side of his bed, and looked across the room and out into the sunlit street beyond. "Is that something you have just discovered?" answered Sergeant Griffin without taking his eyes from the newspaper before him. He was seated by the window, musing the morning news, his curved pipe hanging idle from his mouth, from which incipient clouds of smoke lazily issued and as lazily climbed upward and vanished through the open casement into threads of nothingness. "No," was the reply, "but I have come to the conclusion that the philosophy of religious prejudice cannot be harmonized with true patriotism. They stand against each other as night and day. The one necessarily excludes the other." "Do you know, Captain," the sergeant reasoned, pointing towards Stephen with the stem of his pipe, "a hard shell and a fool are somewhat alike; one won't reason; the other can't."