"Are you not a messenger from Sir William Johnson?" prompted Connolly, with his domineering smile of patronage.
"Yes, Doctor Connolly," I replied, slowly. As I spoke, fright vanished.
There was a pause. Dunmore tapped on his box and moistened his slitted mouth with a tongue which looked perfectly blue to me, and he fell a-smirking and bridling, with sly, rheumy glances at the gallery.
"Lord Dunmore," I said, steadily, "ere I inform you why I am here, you shall know me better than you think you do.
"I am not here to tell you of that chain which links the Governor of Virginia with the corpse of Logan's youngest child!—nor to count the links of that chain backward, from Greathouse to Murdy, to Gibson, to Connolly, to—"
"Stop!" burst out Connolly, springing to his feet. "Who are you? What are you? How dare you address such language to the Earl of Dunmore?"
Astonished, furious, eyes injected with blood, he stood shaking his mottled red fists at me; Dunmore sat in a heap, horrified, with the simper on his face stamped into a grin of terror. The interruption stirred up my blood to the boiling; I clutched the back of the bench in front of me, and fixed my eyes on Connolly.
"I do not reply to servants," I said; "my business here is not with Lord Dunmore's lackeys. If the Earl of Dunmore knows not my name and title, he shall know it now! I am Michael Cardigan, cornet in the Border Horse, and deputy of Sir William Johnson, Baronet, his Majesty's Superintendent of Indian Affairs for North America!
"Who dares deny me right of speech?"
Dunmore lay in his chair, a shrunken mess of lace and ribbon; Connolly appeared paralyzed; Gibson stared at me over his table.