Adam Gaudylock came, when his leisure served him, to Fontenoy as he went everywhere, by virtue of his quality of free lance and golden-tongued narrator of western news.  The stress of thought at the moment was to the West and the empire that had been purchased there; and a man from beyond Kentucky, with tales to tell of the Mississippi Territory, brought his own welcome to town, tavern, and plantation.  If this were true of all, it was trebly true of Adam, who had been born open-eyed.  As the magnet draws the filings, so he drew all manner of tidings.  News came to him as by a thousand carrier pigeons.  He took toll of the solitary in the brown and pathless woods, of the boatmen upon fifty rivers, of the Indian braves about the council-fire, of hunters, trappers, traders, and long lines of Conestoga wagons, of soldiers on frontier posts, Jesuit missionaries upon the Ohio, camp-meeting orators by the Kentucky and the upper James, martial emissaries of three governments, village lawyers, gamblers, dealers in lotteries, and militia colonels, Spanish intendants, French agents, American settlers, wild Irish, thrifty Germans, Creoles, Indians, Mestizos, Quadroons, Congo blacks,—­from the hunter in the forest to the slave in the fields, and from the Governor of the vast new territory to the boatman upon a Mississippi ark, not a type of the restless time but imparted to Adam something of its view of life and of the winds that vexed its sea.  He was a skilful compounder, and when, forever wandering, he wandered back by wood and stream to the sunny, settled lands east of the Blue Ridge, he gave to the thirsty in plantation and town bright globules of hard fact in a heady elixir of fancy.  While he talked all men were adventurers, and all women admired him.  Adam liked this life and this world; asked nothing better than to journey through a hundred such.

Now, sitting at his ease in the blue room, a fortnight after Rand’s accident, he delivered a score of messages from the Republicans of the county, gentle and simple, whom he had chanced to encounter since the accident to their representative.

“Colonel Randolph says the President has bad luck with the horses he gives—­young Mr. Carr was thrown by a bay mare from Shadwell.  Old Jowett swears that a trooper of Tarleton’s broke his neck at that identical place—­says you can hear him any dark night swearing like the Hessian he was.  They drank your health at the Eagle, the night they heard of the accident, with bumpers—­drank it just after Mr. Jefferson’s and before the memory of Washington.  ‘Congress next!’ they said.  ’Hurrah!  He’ll scatter the Black Cockades—­he’ll make the Well-born cry King’s Cruse!  Hip, hip, hurrah!  What’s he doing at Fontenoy?  They’ll put poison in his cup!  Hurrah!’”

“Fontenoy will not put poison in my cup,” said Rand.  “I hope some one was there to say as much.”

“I said it,” answered Adam.  “They are a noisy lot.  Tom Mocket made a speech and compared you to Moses.  He wept when he made it, and they had to hold him steady on his feet.  When they broke up, I took him home to the Partridge.  I’ll tell you one speech that he never made by himself, and that’s the speech that’s going to hang Fitch.”