“Nothing.  For the Lord’s sake, Lewis, is this the end of everything?”

“Everything is a large word.  It is the end of this.”  He pushed a table closer to the fireplace and transferred to it his armful of papers.  “Strike a light, will you?  Here goes every line that can incriminate.  If Burr did as he was told, and burned two letters of mine, there’ll not be a word when I finish here.”  He tore a paper across and tossed it into the flame.  “Tom, Tom, don’t look so woe-begone!  Life is long, and now and then a battle will be lost.  A battle—­a campaign, a war!  But given the fighter, all wars will not be lost.  Somewhere, there awaits Victory, hard-won, but laurel-crowned!” He tore and burned another paper.  “This fat’s in the fire, this chance has gone by, this road’s barricaded, and we must across country to another!  Well, I shall make it serve, the smooth, green, country road that jog-trots to market!  What is man but a Mercenary, a Swiss, to die before whatever door will give him moderate pay?  I would have had a kingdom an I could.  I would have ruled, ay, by God, and ruled well!  The great wheel will not have it so.  Down, then, that action! and up this.  The King is dead:  long live the King!—­alias the Law, Respectability, Virginia, and the Union!” He tossed in a double handful.

“All those!” said Tom dully.  “I hate to see them burn.”

“They might have burned this morning,” answered the other.  “I gave you orders to burn them if I fell, the moment you heard it.”

“But you did not fall.”

“No.  He fired into the air.”  Rand tore the paper in his hand across and across.  “He had me in his trap.  That was why—­that was why he spared to fire!  Oh, I could take this check from the hand of Fortune, or the hand of Malice, or the hand of Treachery, or the hand of Policy, but, but”—­he crushed the torn paper in his hands, then flung it from him with a violent and sinister gesture—­“to take it from the hand of Ludwell Cary—­that requires more than my philosophy is prepared to give!  Let him look to himself!” He thrust in another bundle, and held down with an ashen stick the mass of curling leaves.

CHAPTER XXV

OLD SAINT JOHN’S

The distance was so great from the more populous part of the town to Saint John’s on Church Hill, and the road thereto so steep, in hot weather dusty, in wet deep in mud, that it had become the Richmond custom to worship within the Capitol, in the Hall of the House of Delegates.  But during this August of the year 1807 the habit was foregone.  It was the month in which Aaron Burr, arrested in Alabama in January, brought to Richmond in the early spring, and, since the finding of a true bill, confined in the penitentiary without the town, was to be tried for his life on the charge of high treason.  Early and late, during the week, every apartment of the Capitol was in requisition, and though the building