“Was he not noble?” cried Peg, when she would have me alone for a moment. “Was he not grand? I would give my life if for one hour I might be a man, and be a man like that.”
And yet for all the plain sureness of that toast, and the General's looks of decision which were sent to be its escort, the rebellionists would ask a further sign. They sent the insinuating Rhetz to call upon the General. That was the next morning.
The politic Rhetz presented himself, and the General met him with a manner of studied distance. He would have the visitor to know how he held him for no friend. This was meant to give the General's words more weight-, since the other would understand that he stood upon guard and spoke nothing he did not intend to carry out.
“Mr. President,” said Rhetz, suavely deferential, “I go back to my home to-morrow. Have you any message for your South Carolina friends?”
“Yes,” returned the General, with his cold eye on the questioner, “yes, I have a message for my friends of South Carolina.” The words were coming with a slow emphasis like a sentence of death. “Their state is a part of the Union, and a part of the Union it shall remain. You may tell them, if one South Carolina finger be raised in defiance of this government, that I shall come down there; and once I'm there, I'll hang the first man I lay hands on to the first tree I can reach.”
CHAPTER XV—HOW PEG WAS SAVED FROM PEG.
Now when the General's toast at that banquet in the Indian Queen had gone abroad, it would have the effect of a warning, each man taking it home. A mighty silence fell upon States Rights; the foxes of Nullification found their dens, and were to be noticed for a sudden absence from one's eye and ear where but the day before with their presence and their yelpings they would fill both.
It will have a strange look, but it was the General, himself, who of all folk fostered a distrust of his course.