"Tell the scoundrel who sent you that I am a soldier. I was a soldier in Germany before I cast my fortunes with the South. I bear in my body the wounds of honorable warfare. If I hadn't time to learn the meaning of honor from my friends in the South, my mother taught me in the old world. You ask me to save my life from these assassins by swearing away the life of another. Tell my executioner that I never saw the President of the Confederacy. I never received an order of any kind from him. I did the best I could for the men in my charge at Andersonville and tried honestly to improve their conditions. I am not a perjurer, even to save my own life. A soldier's business is to die. I am ready." Socola extended his hand through the bars and grasped the prisoner's. The deeper he dived into the seething mass of corruption and blind passion which had engulfed Washington the more desperate he saw the situation of Davis at Fortress Monroe. After two weeks of careful work he hurried to New York and reported the situation to O'Connor. "The master mind," he began slowly, "I found at once. His name is Holt--" "The Judge Advocate General?" "Yes." "That accounts for my inability to obtain a copy of the charges against Davis. Holt drew those charges. They are in his hands and he has determined to press his prisoner to trial before his Board of Assassins without allowing me to know the substance of his accusations. It's infamous." "There are complications which may increase our dangers or suddenly lift them--" "Complications--what do you mean?" "The President, who has been intensely hostile to Davis, realizes that his own term of office and possibly his life are now at stake. He has broken with the Radicals who control Congress, old Thaddeus Stevens's at their head. Stevens lives in Washington in brazen defiance of conventionalities with a negro woman whom he separated from her husband thirty odd years ago. Under the influence of this negress he has introduced a bill into the House of Representatives to confiscate the remaining property of the white people of the South and give it to the negroes--dividing the land into plots of forty acres each. He proposes also to disfranchise the whites of the Southern States, enfranchise the negroes, destroy the State lines and erect on their ruins territories ruled by negroes whom his faction can control. "Johnson the President, a Southern born white man, has already informed the Radicals that he will fight this programme to the last ditch. Stevens' answer was characteristic of the imperious old leader. 'Let him dare! I'll impeach Andrew Johnson, remove him from office and hang him from the balcony of the White House.' "The President realizes that the Bureau of Military Justice which he allowed Holt to create may be used as the engine of his own destruction. They have already taken the first steps to impeach him--" "Then he'll never dare allow another case to be tried before that Bureau--" O'Connor interrupted.