"The man is at Johnson's Cross Roads: letters from Cambridge tell me so. It was the deceased Mrs. Custis's brother, Allan McLane."
"Again I ask you to think of Vesta and her many sacrifices!"
"I do. I have promised her that she shall never receive a cruel word from me. But I shall not spare my assassins. To them I shall be as one they have killed, and whose blood smokes, for vengeance. I possess the only warrant that can drive them from Maryland."
He laid a roll of bank-notes on the table suggestively.
"No wealth is accumulated in vain," said Meshach Milburn, his delicate nostrils distended and his fine hand pointing to the bank-bills. "Now, war on Johnson's Cross Roads!"
He crossed the old room over the store, and, opening the green chest, brought out the Entailed Hat, and took it in his hand with a grim smile.
"Here is something I thought to lay aside on my wife's account," he spoke. "Her people compel me to wear it! I thought all malice to this poor hat would be done with my social triumph here. But I am not a man to be frightened. Let them kill me, but it shall be under my ancestral brim."
"Oh! hear your mocking-bird sing again as it did: 'Vesta—Meshach—Love!' Where is the bird?"
Meshach Milburn shook his head and put the Entailed Hat upon it. "Tom left me," he said, "when they began to fire bullets at my Hat."