“What is it that you wish, my Gouverneur Faulkner?” I asked as I looked down upon him as he sat with a paper in his hand regarding it intently. And as I looked I observed that he, as well as I, had not entirely disrobed after that very brilliant reception. He had discarded his coat of the raven and also what is called a vest in America, and he was very beautiful to me in the whiteness of his very fine linen above which his dark bronze hair with its silver crests, that I had always observed to be in a very sleek order, was tossed into a mop that resembled the usual appearance of my own. His eyes were very deep under their heavy lashes but of the brilliancy of the stars in the blackness of a dark night.
“Sit down here under the light beside me,” was his next command to me, and he reached out one of his slender and powerful hands and drew me down into a chair very close beside him.
“What is it?” I asked as my head came so close to his that I felt the warmth of his breath on my cold cheek.
“Hold these two fragments of paper together and translate the French written upon them literally,” he said to me as he handed me two small pieces of paper upon which there was writing.
And this is what I discovered to be written:
"Honored Madam:
"The one at the head of all has sent me to this place to inspect grazing lands and make report. I send in a report of what is not here and the signing of the papers by your Gouverneur Faulkner must be done quickly in blindness before a discovery of what is not--"
“It is written to a woman,” I said very quietly as I made a finish of reading.
“Yes, boy, to a woman. I have made my last fight to—to hold an old belief, which in some way seemed to be—be one of my foundation stones. The General is right: they are all alike, the soft, beautiful, lying things. The truth is not in them, and their own or a man’s honor is a plaything. That piece of paper was sent me by a man up in the mountains of Old Harpeth, who loves me with the same blood bond that I love you, boy, all on account of a gun struck up in the hands of his enemy. Here’s the note he sent with it.
“Bill, we cotched a furren man fer a revenue up by the still at Turkey Gulch and this was in his pocket. I made out to read yo name. I send it. The man is kept tied. What is mules worth? Send price and what to do with this man critter by son Jim. Hell, Bill, they ain’t no grazing fer five thousand mules on Paradise Ridge, but I know a place.
“Jim Todd.”
“What is the significance of this paper, my Gouverneur Faulkner?” I asked after I had made the attempt to translate to myself the very peculiar writing he had given to me.