Merry turned upon Burr suddenly a deep and estimating eye.
"I begin to see," said he, "that you are open to conviction, Mr. Burr."
"Not open to conviction," said Aaron Burr, "but already convinced!"
"What do you mean, Colonel Burr?" The Englishman bent toward him, frowning in intentness.
"I mean that perhaps I have something to say to you two gentlemen of the foreign courts which will be of interest and importance to you."
"Where, then, could we meet after this is over?"
The minister from Great Britain surely was not beyond close and ready estimate of events.
"At my residence, after this dinner," rejoined Aaron Burr instantly. His eye did not waver as it looked into the other's, but blazed with all the fire of his own soul. "Across the Alleghanies, along the great river, there is a land waiting, ready for strong men. Are we such men, gentlemen? And can we talk freely as such among ourselves?"
Their conversation, carried on in ordinary tones, had not been marked by any. Their brows, drawn sharp in sudden resolution, their glance each to the other, made their ratification of this extraordinary speech.
They had no time for anything further at the moment. A sound came to their ears, and they turned toward the head of the long table, where the tall figure of the President of the United States was rising in his place. The dinner had drawn toward its close.
Mr. Jefferson now stood, gravely regarding those before him, his keen eye losing no detail of the strange scene. He knew the place of every man and woman at that board--perhaps this was his own revenge for a reception he once had had at London. But at last he spoke.
"I have news for you all, my friends, today; news which applies not to one man nor to one woman of this or any country more than to another, but news which belongs to all the world."
He paused for a moment, and held up in his right hand a tiny scrap of paper, thin, crumpled. None could guess what significance it had.
"May God in His own power punish me," said he, solemnly, "if ever I halt or falter in what I believe to be my duty! I place no bounds to the future of this republic--based, as I firmly believe it to be, upon the enduring principle of the just and even rights of mankind.
"Our country to the West always has inspired me with the extremest curiosity, and animated me with the loftiest hopes. Since the year 1683 that great river, the Missouri, emptying into the Mississippi, has been looked upon as the way to the Pacific Ocean. One hundred years from that time--that is to say, in 1783--I myself asked one of the ablest of our Westerners, none other than General George Rogers Clark, to undertake a journey of exploration up that Western river. It was not done. Three years later, when accredited to the court at Paris, I met a Mr. Ledyard, an American then abroad. I desired him to cross Russia, Siberia and the Pacific Ocean, and then to journey eastward over the Stony Mountains, to find, if he could, the head of that Missouri River of which we know so little. But Ledyard failed, for reasons best known, perhaps, to the monarch of Russia.