“You’re a liar! You’re a spy and a liar! You’re as good as a murderer! You are a murderer! You’re helping wreck the character of the best general we’ve got, so you can wreck and destroy the rest of us! Who gave you that letter?”

He persisted in his denials. “I never saw that letter before!”

I shook my fist at him. “Marie de Sabrevois gave you that letter! She wrote that letter!”

“No!” he cried. “No! I found this ox-goad laying on the ground up at Jones’s farm. I never knowed anything was in it. You’re making up lies—making ’em up so you can hang me for not being in the army! I ain’t done nothing all my life but work hard chopping wood and harvesting crops, and now you want to kill me for something I ain’t done!” He stared at us, his face contorted; and suddenly, distressingly, tears welled from his eyes to cling in irregular silver threads to the black bristles on his cheeks.

“That’ll do you no good,” I told him. “You’ve got just one chance. Tell us who that letter was going to, and you may be alive tomorrow. You don’t need to tell us who it came from, because I know.”

The stranger eyed us wildly.

Cap Huff went to the cow and untied its halter. “What kind of a knot you want?” he asked me. “One that’ll break his neck, or one that’ll strangle him?”

We silently studied our prisoner.

He cleared his throat. When he spoke, we could hardly hear him. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“If we don’t,” Cap assured him, “we’ll get word to you right away—with a rope.”

The stranger cleared his throat again. “The letter wasn’t going to anybody in particular. Orders were to leave it where any high-up militia officer would be bound to see it and read it. A colonel maybe; or best of all, a general.”

“Oh, here, here!” Cap bawled. “That ain’t no kind of answer! Half these militia officers can’t read! Come on; where’ll we hang him?”

Nason signed to Cap to be quiet. “I shouldn’t wonder if that explanation was the truth.” To me he said, “If it hadn’t been for you, this man would probably have got away. We’ll leave the decision to you. What do you want done with him?”

Nathaniel was in my mind; and I know, too, he was in Nason’s thoughts, and Cap’s and Tom’s. I had an inclination to be merciful. “Well,” I said, “we ought to hang him, of course, but maybe he’d be more use to us alive than dead.”

“Have it your own way,” Nason said. “Do you—do you think he could carry back word to—could help your—help your—–”