Neither cup for the wine nor answer to the question being forthcoming, Haward looked up from his broken bottle.  The man was standing with his body bent forward and his hand pressed against the wood of a great cask behind him until the finger-nails showed white.  His head was high, his face dark red and angry, his brows drawn down until the gleaming eyes beneath were like pin points.

So sudden and so sinister was the change that Haward was startled.  The hour was late, the place deserted; as the man had discovered, he had no weapons, nor, strong, active, and practiced as he was, did he flatter himself that he could withstand the length of brawn and sinew before him.  Involuntarily, he stepped backward until there was a space between them, casting at the same moment a glance toward the wall where hung axe and knife and hatchet.

The man intercepted the look, and broke into a laugh.  The sound was harsh and gibing, but not menacing.  “You need not be afraid,” he said.  “I do not want the feel of a rope around my neck,—­though God knows why I should care!  Here is no clansman of mine, and no cursed Campbell either, to see my end!”

“I am not afraid,” Haward answered calmly.  Walking to the shelf that held an array of drinking vessels, he took two cups, filled them with wine, and going back to his former station, set one upon the cask beside the storekeeper.  “The wine is good,” he said.  “Will you drink?”

The other loosened the clasp of his hand upon the wood and drew himself upright.  “I eat the bread and drink the water which you give your servants,” he answered, speaking with the thickness of hardly restrained passion.  “The wine cup goes from equal to equal.”

As he spoke he took up the peace offering, eyed it for a moment with a bitter smile, then flung it with force over his shoulder.  The earthen floor drank the wine; the china shivered into a thousand fragments.  “I have neither silver nor tobacco with which to pay for my pleasure,” continued the still smiling storekeeper.  “When I am come to the end of my term, then, an it please you, I will serve out the damage.”

Haward sat down upon a keg of powder, crossed his knees, and, with his chin upon his hand, looked from between the curled lengths of his periwig at the figure opposite.  “I am glad to find that in Virginia, at least, there is honesty,” he said dryly.  “I will try to remember the cost of the cup and the wine against the expiry of your indenture.  In the mean time, I am curious to know why you are angry with me whom you have never seen before to-day.”

With the dashing of the wine to earth the other’s passion had apparently spent itself.  The red slowly left his face, and he leaned at ease against the cask, drumming upon its head with his fingers.  The sunlight, shrinking from floor and wall, had left but a single line of gold.  In the half light strange and sombre shapes possessed the room; through the stillness, beneath the sound of the tattoo upon the cask head, the river made itself heard.