No one answers, for no one knows. As for the General himself, his lips are as dumb as a statue's. Traitors may go wrong, or go right; he will light no lamp for their guidance. The awful suspense is carrying many of the treason mongers to the brink of hysteria. Even Statesman Calhoun, morbid and ambition-mad, is made to pause. He himself begins to wonder if it would not be as well and as wise to measure in advance those iron-bound anti-treason lengths to which the General stands ready to go.
To help them in their perplexity, Statesman
Calhoun and his Nullifying followers evolve a cunning scheme. In its amiable execution, it should lay bare, they think, the purposes of the General. Statesman Calhoun and his coconspirators have long ago laid claim to the dead Jefferson as their patron saint of “Nullification,” asserting that precious tenet to be his invention. They decide to give a dinner in honor of the departed publicist. The dinner shall take place on the dead Jefferson's birthday at the Indian Queen. The General shall come as a guest. Statesman Calhoun and his co-conspirators will be there. Statesman Calhoun will offer a toast, declaratory of those superior rights over the Federal government which he asserts in favor of the separate States. It shall be a Nullification toast, one redolent of a State's right to secede from the Federal Union.
Statesman Calhoun having launched his fireship of sentiment, the General will be requested to give a toast. Should he comply, it is believed by Statesman Calhoun and his co-conspirators that he will in partial measure at least unlock his plans. If he refuse—why then, under the circumstances, his refusal will be pregnant of meaning. In either event, he will be beneath the batteries of five hundred eyes, and much should be read in his face.
That Jefferson dinner is an admirable device, one adapted to draw the General's fire. Its authors go about felicitating themselves upon their sagacity in evolving it.
“What say you, Major?” asks the General, when he receives the invitation upon which so much of national good or ill may pend; “what say you? Shall we humor them? You know what these Calhoun traitors are after.”
“True!” responds Wizard Lewis; “they want to count us, and measure us, in that business of their proposed treason.”
“I'll tell you what I think,” says the General, after a pause. “I'll fail to attend; but you shall go, and be counted in my stead. Also, since they'll expect a toast from me, I'll send them one in your care. I hope they may find it to their villain liking—they and their archtraitor Calhoun!”
The Indian Queen is a crowded hostelry that Jefferson night. The halls and waiting rooms are thronged of eminent folk. Some are there to attend the dinner; others for gossip and to hear the news. As Wizard Lewis climbs the stairs to the banquet room on the second floor, he encounters the lion-faced Webster coming down.
“There's too much secession in the air for me,” says the lion-faced one, shrugging his heavy shoulders.