In the same abstracted voice he told the coachman to drive home.  The return seemed interminable—­though he never shifted his position.  Yet when he drew up at his own door and looked at his watch he found he had been absent only half an hour.  Only half an hour!  As he entered the house he turned with the same abstraction towards a mirror in the hall, as if he expected to see some outward and visible change in himself in that time.  Dismissing his servants to bed, he went into his dressing-room, completely changed his attire, put on a pair of long riding-boots, and throwing a serape over his shoulders, paused a moment, took a pair of small “Derringer” pistols from a box, put them in his pockets, and then slipped cautiously down the staircase.  A lack of confidence in his own domestics had invaded him for the first time.  The lights were out.  He silently opened the door and was in the street.

He walked hastily a few squares to a livery stable whose proprietor he knew.  His first inquiry was for one “Redskin,” a particular horse; the second for its proprietor.  Happily both were in.  The proprietor asked no question of a customer of Clarence’s condition.  The horse, half Spanish, powerful and irascible, was quickly saddled.  As Clarence mounted, the man in an impulse of sociability said,—­

“Saw you at the theatre to-night, sir.”

“Ah,” returned Clarence, quietly gathering up the reins.

“Rather a smart trick of that woman with the flag,” he went on tentatively.  Then, with a possible doubt of his customer’s politics, he added with a forced smile, “I reckon it’s all party fuss, though; there ain’t any real danger.”

But fast as Clarence might ride the words lingered in his ears.  He saw through the man’s hesitation; he, too, had probably heard that Clarence Brant weakly sympathized with his wife’s sentiments, and dared not speak fully.  And he understood the cowardly suggestion that there was “no real danger.”  It had been Clarence’s one fallacy.  He had believed the public excitement was only a temporary outbreak of partisan feeling, soon to subside.  Even now he was conscious that he was less doubtful of the integrity of the Union than of his own household.  It was not the devotion of the patriot, but the indignation of an outraged husband, that was spurring him on.

He knew that if he reached Woodville by five o’clock he could get ferried across the bay at the Embarcadero, and catch the down coach to Fair Plains, whence he could ride to the Rancho.  As the coach did not connect directly with San Francisco, the chance of his surprising them was greater.  Once clear of the city outskirts, he bullied Redskin into irascible speed, and plunged into the rainy darkness of the highroad.  The way was familiar.  For a while he was content to feel the buffeting, caused by his rapid pace, of wind and rain against his depressed head and shoulders in a sheer brutal sense of opposition and power, or