myself in your power.
Remember this: if my point is not carried within three days, or if it
be balked by your interference, I will blow out my brains. I have
walked to the door of hell on the battle-field, and I can go further."

He seized his hat and hurried away like a fury. Arthur MacNair stood
motionless an instant in the middle of the floor, and then, worn out
with the intensity of the scene, his limbs gave way beneath him, and
he fell unconscious.

In a moment the hard, strong face and giant form of Jabel Blake
appeared over the threshold of the bedroom; he lifted his Congressman
and counsel in his arms and carried him grimly to a sofa.

III.

The Honorable Perkiomen Trappe was much delighted, on the morning
subsequent to the occurrences related in our last chapter, to see
Jabel Blake walk down Pennsylvania Avenue with the pensive air of a
man whose heart had been broken. The Honorable Perkiomen supposed that
Jabel had failed to receive some drawback or other upon his
income-tax, and he rejoiced in the reverses of the close and thrifty.

But Jabel Blake was now concerned solely with the sudden and violent
rupture between the MacNair brothers. He had little acquaintance with
Elk MacNair, and no great fondness for him; but, being well informed
as to the positive, combative traits of character in Arthur MacNair,
Jabel knew very well that what his counsel had threatened to do he
would do, though his own heart-strings might be sundered.

The deepest wish in Jabel's heart, next to establishing a national
bank in Ross Valley, was to see the marriage between Kate Dunlevy and
the MacNair family brought to pass; yet such was his reverence for the
Dunlevys and so great his antagonism to the Washington Lobby that he
was half inclined to be himself the means of breaking off the match
between the daughter of his great neighbor and exemplar and the son of
his old chum and companion.

Jabel took his way to the house of the old Circuit Judge, which was
one of a row of tall brown-stone structures not far from the city
hall, and when he rang the bell a servant showed him to a library in
the second story, where the Judge was dictating certain judicial
opinions to his daughter. The two elderly men retired to an adjacent
apartment, which seemed, from its appointments and the character of
needlework and literature strewn about, to be the _boudoir_ of Miss
Dunlevy; and the Judge, who was somewhat past the prime of life,
plunged