"What shape of hat was it?" McLane asked, shaking the negro savagely; "was it like this?" shaping his own soft slouched hat to a point.
Black Dave looked, and shook his head.
"Not like that? Damnation!"
"No swearing, Colonel, before us conservatives," ventured Joe Johnson; "what was the hat like, Dave? You're drunk."
"Like dis, I reckon." He modelled the crown into a bell form with his finger.
Joe Johnson and McLane looked at each other a minute with mutual accusation and confusion, and the former unceremoniously knocked the negro down with his great fist.
"No gold of mine for this job, Joe Johnson," said Allan McLane; "in your conservatism to save your own skin, you have let your tool kill an innocent man."
He waved his hand, with all his strong will, towards the door, and shut it in the kidnapper's face. Then, in haughty emotion, not like fear, but disappointed pride and revenge, McLane sat down, glanced around him as if to determine the next movement, and instinctively reached his hand towards his Bible, which he opened at a marked page, and softly read, till tears of baffled vindictiveness and counterfeited humility stopped his voice, as follows:
"'To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up ... God requireth that which is past ... man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity.... a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?'"
When tears of pious vindictiveness had closed the reading, Colonel McLane spread his pongee handkerchief on the bare floor, and knelt in silent and comfortably assured prayer.