Tennessee and Alabama, the intricacies of politics of Ohio and New York,
mixed as those things were in Tyler's time. I had even been as far west
as the Rockies, of which young Frémont was now beginning to write so
understandingly. For six months I had been in Mississippi and Texas
studying matters and men, and now, just hack from Natchitoches, I felt
that I had earned some little rest.

But there was the fascination of it--that big game of politics. No, I
will call it by its better name of statesmanship, which sometimes it
deserved in those days, as it does not to-day. That was a day of
Warwicks. The nominal rulers did not hold the greatest titles.
Naturally, I knew something of these things, from the nature of my work
in Calhoun's office. I have had insight into documents which never
became public. I have seen treaties made. I have seen the making of
maps go forward. This, indeed, I was in part to see that very night, and
curiously, too.

How the Baroness von Ritz--beautiful adventuress as she was sometimes
credited with being, charming woman as she was elsewhere described,
fascinating and in some part dangerous to any man, as all
admitted--could care to be concerned with this purely political question
of our possible territories, I was not shrewd enough at that moment in
advance to guess; for I had nothing more certain than the rumor she was
England's spy. I bided my time, knowing that ere long the knowledge must
come to me in Calhoun's office even in case I did not first learn more
than Calhoun himself.

Vaguely in my conscience I felt that, after all, my errand was
justified, even though at some cost to my own wishes and my own pride.
The farther I walked in the dark along Pennsylvania Avenue, into which