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to work, and
to-morrow very likely will bring work for you to do."
Calhoun sighed. "God!" he exclaimed, "if I but had back my strength!
If there were more than those scant remaining years!"
"Go!" said he suddenly; and so we others passed down his step and out
into the semi-lighted streets.
So this, then, was my errand. My mind still tingled at its unwelcome
quality. Doctor Ward guessed something of my mental dissatisfaction.
"Never mind, Nicholas," said he, as we parted at the street corner,
where he climbed into the rickety carriage which his colored driver
held awaiting him. "Never mind. I don't myself quite know what
Calhoun wants; but he would not ask of you anything personally
improper. Do his errand, then. It is part of your work. In any case--"
and I thought I saw him grin in the dim light--"you may have a night

which you will remember."
There proved to be truth in what he said.
CHAPTER III
IN ARGUMENT
The egotism of women is always for two.--Mme. De Stäel.
The thought of missing my meeting with Elisabeth still rankled in my
soul. Had it been another man who asked me to carry this message, I
must have refused. But this man was my master, my chief, in whose
service I had engaged.
Strange enough it may seem to give John Calhoun any title showing
love or respect. To-day most men call him traitor--call him the man
responsible for the war between North and South--call him the arch
apostle of that impossible doctrine of slavery, which we all now admit
was wrong. Why, then, should I love him as I did? I can not say, except
that I always loved, honored and admired courage, uprightness,
integrity.
For myself, his agent, I had, as I say, left the old Trist homestead at the
foot of South Mountain in Maryland, to seek my fortune in our capital
city. I had had some three or four years' semi-diplomatic training when
I first met Calhoun and entered his service as assistant. It was under
him that I finished my studies in law. Meantime, I was his messenger in
very many quests, his source of information in many matters where he
had no time to go into details.
Strange enough had been some of the circumstances in which I found
myself thrust through this relation with a man so intimately connected
for a generation with our public life. Adventures were always to my
liking, and surely I had my share. I knew the frontier marches of
Tennessee and Alabama, the intricacies of politics of Ohio and New
York, mixed as those things were in Tyler's time. I had even been as far
west as the Rockies, of which young Frémont was now beginning to

write so understandingly. For six months I had been in Mississippi and
Texas studying matters and men, and now, just hack from Natchitoches,
I felt that I had earned some little rest.
But there was the fascination of it--that big game of politics. No, I will
call it by its better name of statesmanship, which sometimes it deserved
in those days, as it does not to-day. That was a day of Warwicks. The
nominal rulers did not hold the greatest titles. Naturally, I knew
something of these things, from the nature of my work in Calhoun's
office. I have had insight into documents which never became public. I
have seen treaties made. I have seen the making of maps go forward.
This, indeed, I was in part to see that very night, and curiously, too.
How the Baroness von Ritz--beautiful adventuress as she was
sometimes credited with being, charming woman as she was elsewhere
described, fascinating and in some part dangerous to any man, as all
admitted--could care to be concerned with this purely political question
of our possible territories, I was not shrewd enough at that moment in
advance to guess; for I had nothing more certain than the rumor she
was England's spy. I bided my time, knowing that ere long the
knowledge must come to me in Calhoun's office even in case I did not
first learn more than Calhoun himself.
Vaguely in my conscience I felt that, after all, my errand was justified,
even though at some cost to my own wishes and my own pride. The
farther I walked in the dark along Pennsylvania Avenue, into which
finally I swung after I had crossed Rock Bridge, the more I realized that
perhaps this big game was worth playing in detail and without quibble
as the master mind should dictate. As he was servant of a purpose, of
an ideal of triumphant democracy, why should not I also serve in a
cause so splendid?
I was, indeed, young--Nicholas Trist, of Maryland; six feet tall,