Now where did the bungler who killed me by proxy come
from?"
"I will be frank with you, sir. Joe Johnson, the kidnapper, was also
here: Mary says so. To save Virgie from him, I helped her away."
"Now," said Milburn, "what enemy of mine delegated the kidnapper to
procure a murderer?"
He waited a moment without response, and answered, in a low tone of
voice, his own question:
"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.
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