have ruled, ay, by
God, and ruled well! The great wheel will not have it so. Down, then,
that action! and up this. The King is dead: long live the King!--alias
the Law, Respectability, Virginia, and the Union!" He tossed in a double
handful.

"All those!" said Tom dully. "I hate to see them burn."

"They might have burned this morning," answered the other. "I gave you
orders to burn them if I fell, the moment you heard it."

"But you did not fall."

"No. He fired into the air." Rand tore the paper in his hand across and
across. "He had me in his trap. That was why--that was why he spared to
fire! Oh, I could take this check from the hand of Fortune, or the hand
of Malice, or the hand of Treachery, or the hand of Policy, but,
but"--he crushed the torn paper in his hands, then flung it from him
with a violent and sinister gesture--"to take it from the hand of
Ludwell Cary--that requires more than my philosophy is prepared to give!
Let him look to himself!" He thrust in another bundle, and held down
with an ashen stick the mass of curling leaves.

CHAPTER XXV

OLD SAINT JOHN'S

The distance was so great from the more populous part of the town to
Saint John's on Church Hill, and the road thereto so steep, in hot
weather dusty, in wet deep in mud, that it had become the Richmond
custom to worship within the Capitol, in the Hall of the House of
Delegates. But during this August of the year 1807 the habit was
foregone. It was the month in which Aaron Burr, arrested in Alabama in
January, brought to Richmond in the early spring, and, since the finding
of a true bill, confined in the penitentiary without the town, was to be
tried for his life on the charge of high treason. Early and late, during
the week, every apartment of the Capitol was in requisition, and though
the building itself was closed on Sunday, the Capitol Square remained, a
place of rendezvous, noise, heat, confusion, and dispute. There was in
the town a multitude of strangers, with a range from legal, political,
military, and naval heights, through a rolling country of frontiersmen,
to a level of Ohio boatmen, servants, and nondescript. Many were
witnesses subpoenaed by the Government, others had been called by Burr,
and yet others brought upon the scene by varied interests, or by the
sheer, compelling curiosity which the trial evoked. One and all were
loudly and fiercely partisan. The lesser sort and ruder fry congregated
in numbers beneath the t