Saul's brother-in-law, who had
appeared most opportunely with an offer.
Pegloe's flight created something of a sensation, but it was
dwarfed by the sensation that developed a day or so later when it
became known that Tom Ware and Colonel Fentress had likewise fled
the country. Still later, Fentress' body, showing marks of
violence, was washed ashore at a wood-yard below Girard. It was
conjectured that he and Ware had set out from The Oaks to cross
the river; there was reason to believe that Fentress had in his
possession at the time a considerable sum of money, and it was
supposed that his companion had murdered and robbed him. Of
Ware's subsequent career nothing was ever known.
These were, after all, only episodes in the collapse of the Clan,
sporific manifestations of the great work of disintegration that
was going forward and which the judge, more than any other,
perhaps, had brought about. This was something no one
questioned, and he quickly passed to the first phase of that
unique and peculiar esteem in which he was ever after held. His
fame widened with the succeeding suns; he had offers of help
which impressed him as so entirely creditable to human nature
that he quite lacked the heart to refuse them, especially as he
felt that in the improvement of his own condition the world had
bettered itself and was moving nearer those sound and righteous
ideals of morality and patriotism which had never lacked his
indorsement, no matter how inexpedient it had seemed for him to
put them into practice.
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