They handed him a sealed packet of instructions from the Secretary of War.

The deportation of Chauvenet and Durand was to be effected at once under Claiborne's direction, and he sent Oscar to the stables for the buckboard and sat down on the veranda to discuss the trip to Baltimore with the two secret agents.

They were to gather up the personal effects of the conspirators at the tavern on the drive to Lamar.

The rooms occupied by Chauvenet at Washington had already been ransacked and correspondence and memoranda of a startling character seized.

Chauvenet was known to be a professional blackmailer and plotter of political mischief, and the embassy of Austria-Hungary had identified Durand as an ex-convict who had only lately been implicated in the launching of a dangerous issue of forged bonds in Paris.