ently he seemed to remember that he had come under a signal of truce, which he still carried in his hand. He turned to Henderson quickly, severity in his face.
"I came to propose terms on account of my father," he said, a certain unmistakable deference, a well-defined doubt, showing through his bearing of hauteur and defiance.
Henderson read his mind as readily, in the strained and sharpened acuteness of his own senses, as if Roberto had come honestly and told him all. The man who had spiked the cannon had informed his general of this great service. Roberto had advanced in confident eagerness to overwhelm them, but on the way had been assailed by doubt of the man's honesty. Caution had come whispering that this might be a trick of the Yankee sailor who had bribed the soldier. The sight of the earthworks that had been thrown up in the short time he had been away seemed to give substance to this shadow of doubt. The Yankee might be leading him up to the cannon, only to destroy him in a breath. All this Roberto's face and manner seemed to betray.
Henderson felt the jumping of a new hope, the outspreading of a new plan. It came to him in a flash, as the exigencies of his life seemed to demand of him to plan and decide. The doubt that Roberto had carried there with him must be blown into a blaze of certainty. Circumstances had shaped with peculiar nicety to further this design.
