Not the slenderest clue
to his fate was ever found. After the war the most
diligent inquiry and the offer of large rewards failed
to turn up any of his captors or any fact concerning
his disappearance. He had disappeared, and that
was all.'
Something in Bartine's manner that was not in
his words--I hardly knew what it was--prompted
me to ask:
'What is your view of the matter--of the justice
of it?'
'My view of it,' he flamed out, bringing his
clenched hand down upon the table as if he had been
in a public house dicing with blackguards--'my
view of it is that it was a characteristically dastardly
assassination by that damned traitor, Washington,
and his ragamuffin rebels!'
For some minutes nothing was said: Bartine was
recovering his temper, and I waited. Then I said:
'Was that all?'
'No--there was something else. A few weeks
after my great-grandfather's arrest his watch was
found lying on the porch at the front door of his
dwelling. It was wrapped in a sheet of letter-paper
bearing the name of Rupert Bartine, his only son,
my grandfather. I am wearing that watch.'
Bartine paused. His usually restless black eyes
were staring fixedly into the grate, a point of red
light in each, reflected from the glowing coals. He
seemed to have forgotten me. A sudden threshing
of the branches of a tree outside one of the windows,
and almost at the same instant a rattle of rain
against the glass, recalled him to a sense of his sur-
roundings.
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