lieutenant in his eye, and took him finally aside and demanded a
meeting in the name of Utie. The naval officer answered that he had
simply relieved a lady from a drunken boy; but Tiltock, in the
dramatic way common to halcyon old times, refused to accept either
"drunken" or "boy" as terms appropriate to "the code," and pressed for
an answer. In five minutes the naval officer replied, through his
naval companion, that having ascertained Mr. Utie to be a gentleman's
son, and he as an United States officer not being able to decline a
challenge, the latter was accepted. The weapons were to be pistols,
the place the usual ground at Bladensburg, and the time the afternoon
of the next day.

There was a good deal of drinking and boasting at the hotels that
night, Utie and Tiltock telling everybody, as a particular secret,
that there was to be "an 'fah honah," otherwise a "juel," at
"Bladensburg, sah!" The gin-drinking, cock-fighting, sporting element
of the town was aroused, and Utie and Tiltock were invited on all
sides to imbibe to the significant toast of "The Field." Very noisy,
very insolent, nuisances indeed, these two mere lads--the offspring of
a vain and ignorant social period of which some elements yet
remain--borrowed the money to hire a carriage, and at midnight they
set out with some associates by the old, rutty, clay road for the
Maryland village of Bladensburg. That night they caroused until
Nature, despite her revolt, put them to bed. In the morning, with a
swollen and sallow face, dry hair, unsteady hands, aching eyes and
dim vision, Robert Utie awoke to the recollection of his folly and his
rashness, and he realized the critical period which he had provoked.
His clerkship lost, his self-pride poignant, his pockets nearly empty,
his respectable career irretrievably terminated, his sweetheart
insulted, and his life in danger! There was no escape either from