“You have read my letter!”
“I have, indeed,” returned Noah. “I have repeated word for word your atrocious threats to a lady whom we will not name.” It was verity; with a memory like unto wax, Noah had recalled with every faithfulness of word and mark that menacing epistle Peg brought to me, and which was then under my private lock and key. “Yes, you wrote that letter,” repeated Noah. “And you,” coming round on the Reverend Campbell, who writhed as one in the jaws of wretchedness, unable to make a plan or frame a sentence; “and you, sir, were privy to it.”
“Our dear sister”—he could not lay aside his snuffle even now—“our dear sister did indeed tell me she had sent such a note.”
“You mix your tenses, sir,” retorted Noah, savagely. “She told you before it was dispatched, and you read it.”
* “My dear gentlemen,” broke in the mother, in mighty agitation, “he put that letter in the post himself. Oh, gentlemen, spare my poor daughter!” With that the mother put her arm about the-younger harpy, where, like some frightened thing of sin that can escape no farther, she waited as one frozen.
“Your daughter, madam,” replied Noah, quietly enough, “lies in no peril, although by the law there be punishments for ones who thus misuse the post. But there remains another question. You have put a lie against that lady of the letter into the mouth of our reverend friend. He has retold it to many; this morning he told it to the President. The tale proves itself untrue upon its face, and that is the one merit of it. It was a dangerous falsehood to tell, and”—here Noah looked towards the unhappy Reverend Campbell, who, as though fascinated by the other's baleful eye, lifted up his visage,' with its ugly array of munching mouth and flabby unhealthfulness—“and a still more dangerous falsehood to repeat.”
“What do you require of us, gentlemen?” asked the frightened mother-harpy.
“Nothing, save tongues of peace,” cried Noah. “It is too much to suppose that her friends will rest quiet while you foully tear a good woman to shreds. Tie up your tongues, you three, and the thing rests. Let another word escape, and a torch shall be found to burn you out like any other nest of adders.” The Reverend Campbell made no return to this warning thrown to him with the others. The scoundrel had the wisdom of silence when words would work no benefit. Still, I could trace a hunger for retaliation writhing beneath the coarse snake's skin of him.
“I think we have locked three evil mouths to-day,” observed Noah, as we were about our return. “It is the less important, perhaps, since already a whole flock of these lies has been uncaged in the town.”
“It is never unimportant,” I returned, “to identify an enemy. I am the more relieved, too, since you cleared up the mystery of that written menace. And yet I do not make out how you supposed it gained emanation among these people.”