As you have guessed before you turned this page, the men who charged so opportunely to cut me out of peril were my captors only in the saving sense.
Their overnight bivouac was not above a mile beyond the glade of ambushment. It was in a little dell, cunningly hid; and the embers of the camp-fires were still alive when we of the horse came first to this agreed-on rallying point.
Here at this rendezvous in the forest's heart I had my first sight of any fighting fragment of that undisciplined and yet unconquerable patriot home-guard that even in defeat proved too tough a morsel for British jaws to masticate.
They promised little to the eye of a trained soldier, these border levies. In fancy I could see my old field-marshal,—he was the father of all the martinets,—turn up his nose and dismiss them with a contemptuous "Ach! mein Gott!" And, truly, there was little outward show among them of the sterling metal underneath.
They came singly and in couples, straggling like a routed band of brigands; some loading their pieces as they ran. There was no hint of soldier discipline, and they might have been leaderless for aught I saw of deference to their captain. Indeed, at first I could not pick the captain out by any sign, since all were clad in coarsest homespun and well-worn leather, and all wore the long, fringed hunting shirt and raccoon-skin cap of the free borderers.
Yet these were a handful of the men who had fought so stoutly against the Tory odds at Ramsour's Mill, their captain being that Abram Forney of whom you may read in the histories; and though they made no military show, they lacked neither hardihood nor courage, of a certain persevering sort.
"Ever come any closter to your Amen than that, stranger?" drawled one of them, a grizzled borderer, lank, lean and weather-tanned, with a face that might have been a leathern mask for any hint it gave of what went on behind it. "I'll swear that little whip'-snap' officer cub had the word 'Fire' sticking in his teeth when I gave him old Sukey's mouthful o' lead to chaw on."
I said I had come as near my exit a time or two before, though always in fair fight; and thereupon was whelmed in an avalanche of questions such as only simple-hearted folk know how to ask.
When I had sufficiently accounted for myself, Captain Forney—he was the limber-backed young fellow I had ridden behind—gripped my hand and gave me a hearty welcome and congratulation.
"My father and yours were handfast friends, Captain Ireton. More than that, I've heard my father say he owed yours somewhat on the score of good turns. I'm master glad I've had a chance to even up a little; though as for that, we should both thank the Indian." At which he looked around as one who calls an eye-muster and marks a missing man. "Where is the chief, Ephraim?"—this to the grizzled hunter who was methodically reloading his long rifle.
"He's back yonder, gathering in the hair-crop, I reckon. Never you mind about him, Cap'n. He'll turn up when he smells the meat a-cooking, immejitly,ifnot sooner."
Here, as I imagine, I looked all the questions that lacked answers; for Captain Forney took it in hand to fit them out with explications.
"'Tis Uncanoola, the Catawba," he said; "one of the friendlies. He was out a-scouting last night and came in an hour before daybreak with the news that Colonel Tarleton was set upon hanging a spy of ours. From that to our little ambushment—"
"I see," said I, wanting space to turn the memory leaves. "This Catawba: is he a man about my age?" Captain Forney laughed. "God He only knows an Indian's age. But Uncanoola has been a man grown these fifteen years or more. I can recall his coming to my father's house when I was but a little cadger."
At that, I remembered, too; remembered a tall, straight young savage, as handsome as a figure done in bronze, who used sometimes to meet me in the lonelier forest wilds when I was out a-hunting; remembered how at first I was afraid of him; how once I would have shot him in a fit of boyish race antipathy and sudden fright had he not flung away his firelock and stood before me defenseless.
Also, I recalled a little incident of the terrible scourge in '60 when the black pox bade fair to blot out this tribe of the Catawbas; how when my father had found this young savage lying in the forest, plague-stricken and deserted by all his tribesmen, he had saved his life and earned an Indian friendship.
"I know this Uncanoola," I said. "My father befriended him in the plague of '60, and was never sorry for it, as I believe." Then I would ask if these Catawbas had ranged themselves on the patriot side, a question which led the young militia captain to give me the news at large while his borderers were breaking camp and making their hasty preparations for the day's march.
"'Tis liberty or death with us now; we've burnt our bridges behind us," he said, when he had confirmed the tidings I had had the day before from Father Matthieu. "And since here in Carolina we have to fight each man against his neighbor, 'tis like to go hard with us, lacking help from the North."
"Measured by this morning's work, Captain Forney, these irregulars of yours seem well able to give a good account of themselves," I ventured.
He shook his head doubtfully. He was but a boy in years, but war is a shrewd schoolmaster, and this youth, like many another on the fighting frontier, had matriculated early.
"You've seen us at our best," he amended. "We can ambush like the Indians, fire a volley, yell, charge—and run away."
"What's that ye're saying, youngster?" The grizzled hunter had finished reloading his rifle, and, lounging in earshot with all the freedom of the border, would take the captain up sharply on this last.
"You heard me, Eph Yeates," replied my young captain, curtly.
The old man leaned his rifle against a tree, spat on his hands, cut a clumsy caper in air, and gave tongue in a yell that should have been heard by Tarleton's men at Appleby.
"By the eternal 'coonskins! I can gouge the eye out of ary man that says Eph Yeates carn't stand up fair and square and whop his weight in wildcats; and I can do it now,ifnot sooner!" he shrilled. "Come on, you pap-eating, apron-stringed, French-daddied—"
Where the blast of vituperative insult would have spent itself in natural course we were not to know, for in the midst another of the borderers, a wiry little man in greasy deerskin, came up behind the capering ancient, whipped an arm around his neck, and in a trice the two went down, kicking, scratching, buffeting and mauling, as like to a pair of battling bobcats as was ever seen.
For a moment I thought my youngster would let them have it out to the finish, but he did not. At his order some of the others pulled the twain apart, reluctantly, I fancied; and when the thing was done the old man caught up his rifle and strode away in blackest wrath without a look behind him.
Captain Forney shrugged and spread his hands as his French father might have done.
"Now you know wherein our weakness lies, Captain Ireton," he said. "There goes as true a man and as keen a shot as ever pulled trigger. Let him fight in his own way, and he'll take cover and name his man for every bullet in his pouch. But as for yielding to decent authority, or standing against trained troops in open field—" He shrugged again and turned to tighten his saddle-girth.
"I see," said I. Then I asked him of his plans and intendings, and was told that he and his handful were a-march to join General Rutherford, who was gone to the Forks of Yadkin to break up some Tory embodiment thereabouts.
"You have your work cut out to dodge the British light-horse, Captain Forney," said I; capping the venture by telling him what little I knew of Tarleton's dispositions, and also of the Indian-arming plot I had overheard.
"We'll dodge the redcoats, never you fear; we're at our best in that," he rejoined, carelessly. "And as to the Cherokee upstirring, that's an old story. The king's men have tried it twice and they have not yet caught Jack Sevier or Jimmie Robertson a-napping. Ease your mind on that score, Captain Ireton, and come along with us, if you have nothing better to do. I can promise you hard living, and hard fighting enough to keep it in countenance."
At this I was brought down to some consideration of the present and its demands. As fortune's wheel had twirled, I had my life, to be sure; but by the having of it was made the basest traitor to my friend—to Jennifer, and no whit less to Margery.
'Twas out of any thought that I should take the field against the common enemy, leaving this tangled web of mystery and misery behind. In sheerest decency I owed it first to Jennifer to make a swift and frank confession of the ill-concluded tale of happenings. That done, I owed it equally to him and Margery to find some way to set aside the midnight marriage.
So I fell back upon my wound for an excuse, telling the captain that I was not yet fit to take the field—which was true enough. Whereupon he and his men set me well beyond the danger of immediate pursuit and we parted company.
When I was left alone I had no plan that reached beyond the day's end. Since to go to Jennifer House by daylight would be to run my neck afresh into the noose, I saw nothing for it but to lie in hiding till nightfall. The hiding place that promised best was the old hunting lodge in the forest, and thitherward I turned my face.
It was a wise man who said that he who goes with heavy heart drags heavy feet as well; but while I live I shall remember how that saying clogged the path for me that morning, making the shrub-sweet summer air grow thick and lifeless as I toiled along. For sober second thought, and the unnerving reaction which comes upon the heels of some sharp peril overpast, left me aghast at the coil in which a tricky fate had entangled me.
The second thought made plain the dispiteous hardness of it all, showing me how I had reasoned like a boy in planning for retrieval. Would Jennifer believe my tale, though I should swear it out word for word on the Holy Evangelists? I doubted it; and striving to see it through his eyes, was made to doubt it more. For death should have been my justifier, and death had played me false.
As for setting the midnight marriage aside, I made sure the lawyer tribe could find a way, if that were all. But here there was a loyal daughter of the Church to reckon with. Loathing her bonds, as any true-hearted maiden must, would Margery consent to have them broken by the law? I knew well she would not. Though our poor knotting of the tie had been little better than a tragic farce, it lacked nothing of force to bind the tender conscience of a woman bred to look upon the churchly rite as final.
So, twist and turn it as I might, the coil was desperate; and as I strode on gloomily, measuring this the first stage in a pilgrimage I had never thought to make, a fire of sullen anger began to smoke and smolder within me, and I could find it in my heart to curse the cruel kindness of my rescuers; to sorrow in my inmost soul that they had come between to make a living recreant of one who would fain have died an honest man.
The sun was well above the tree-tops, and the morning was abroad for all the furred and feathered wood-folk, when I forsook the Indian path to make a prudent circle of reconnaissance around the cabin in the maple grove.
Happily, there was no need for the cautionary measure. The hunting lodge was undiscovered as yet by any enemy; and when I showed myself my poor black vassals ran to do my bidding, weeping with childish joy to have me back again.
Since old Darius was still at Appleby Hundred, Tomas ranked as majordomo; and I bade him post the blacks in a loosely drawn sentry line about the cabin, this against the chance that Falconnet might stumble on the place in searching for me. For I made no doubt his Tory spies would quickly pass the word that I was not with Abram Forney's band, and hence must be in hiding.
When all was done I flung myself upon the couch of panther-skins, hoping against hope that sleep might come to help me through the hours of waiting. 'Twas a vain hope. There was never a wink of forgetfulness for me in all the long watches of the summer day, and I must lie wide-eyed and haggard, thinking night would never come, and making sure that fate had never before walled a man in such a dungeon of despair.
There was no loophole of escape with honor; The heavens were brass, with all the horizons narrowed to a bounding wall to hem me in on every side. There was no sally-port in all this wall save one—the one that death had promised to open at the dawn. The promise had been broken. True, death had thrust the key within the lock, and I had heard the grating of the bolts; and yet the key had been withdrawn and I was left a prisoner of life.
There was no hope of other outlet. Now there was space to view it calmly, I saw how foolish was the thought that Margery would connive at any breaking of the marriage bond. She would bear my name, and hate me for the giving of it; would go on hating me, I thought, to all eternity; but she would never take her freedom back again, save at a dead man's hands.
It was thus that each fresh scanning of the prison wall that shut me in this dungeon of dishonor fetched me once and again to this one sally-port of death. And when it came to this; that I had searched in vain for other outlet, you will not think it strange that I sat down in spirit at this postern to see if I might open it with my own hands.
It was not love of life that made me hesitate. At two-score years he who has lived at all has lived his best; and if he live beyond the turning point of youthful ardor he must beg the grace of younger men to linger yet a little longer on the stage which once was his and now is theirs.
No, it was not any love of life for life's own sake that held me back. 'Twas rather that the Ireton blood is linked up with that thing we call a conscience, a heritage from those simple-hearted ancestors to whom the suicide was a soul accurst—a soul impenitent, whose very outer husk of flesh and bones they used to bury at the crossing of the ways, with a sharpened stake to pinion it.
'Twas this ancestral conscience made me cowardly; and when the sight of my father's sword—Darius had rescued and restored it to its place upon the chimney-breast—would set me thinking of the Israelitish king, and how, when all was lost, he fell upon his blade and died, this horror of the suicide came to give me pause.
Besides, that way to right the double wrong was not so clear as it might seem. As matters stood, my living for the present was Margery's best safeguard. Till she became my widow and my heir-at-law, the mercenary baronet would play his cards to win her honorably. I doubted not he'd make hot love to her; but while she stayed a wife, and was not yet a widow, he'd keep his passion decently in bounds, if only for the better compassing of his end.
But from this horn of the dilemma I slipped to fall upon the other. If my living on as Margery's husband was her safety for the time, it was an offering of idol-meats upon the altar of my dear lad's friendship. What would he think of me? How could I go about to make it plain that I had robbed him for his own honor's sake?—that it was not I but fate that was to blame?
These questions came up answerless, like deep-sea plummets where no bottom is. I saw the way no farther on than this; that I must go straightway to Jennifer and tell him all. Beyond that point the darkness was Egyptian, and I could only hope that tricky fate would turn again and blot me out, and make it plain to Richard, and to my dear lady, that love, and not base treachery, had set me on to do as I had done.
In some such dismal grindings of the mill of thought the hours of waiting were outworn at length; and when the sun was dipping to the mountains in the west I rose and washed me in the brook, and afterward constrained myself to eat what Tomas had prepared for me.
The sunset glow was fading in the upper air, and underneath the canopy of leaves the wood was darkening on to twilight, when I made ready to be gone. Because I thought I might have need of it before the night was done, I buckled on the heirloom sword; and telling Tomas and the other blacks for their own safety to keep an alarm guard waking through the night, I sallied forth upon my errand.
I've wished a thousand times, as I sit here before the fire and jot these memories down in crabbed black on white, that I could conjure up for you some speaking picture of this scene primeval in which the story moves.
True, its hills and valleys are the same; the river keeps its course; and in the west the mountain sky-line is unchanged. But here similitude is at an end. You've hacked the virgin forest into shapes and fringes where once it was an ample mantle seamed only by the rivers, and frayed here and there at distant intervals by the settler's ax.
Beneath this mantle lay a world unlike the world you know. Plunged in its furtive depths you felt the spell of nature's mystery upon you; the mystery of the hoary wood, age-old, steeped in the nepenthe of the centuries. In brightest summer day, which, in these forest aisles, became a misty green translucence, the silence, the vastness, the solitude laid each a finger on you, bidding you go softly all the way. But in the twilight hour the real held still more aloof, and all the shadows bristled with dim fantastic shapes to awe and affright the alien-born.
I was not alien-born. From earliest childhood I had known and loved these forest solitudes. Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the twilight shadows awed me. Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half out before the clearer vision came. There it was the figure of a man gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with me as if with sinister intent.
I pushed on faster, drawing the sword to keep me better company, though inwardly I scoffed and jeered at this new twittering of the nerves. What threat was there for me in silent shadows in the wood? The dogs I had to fear were bred in British kennels, and there was never any lack of clamor when they were beating up a cover.
Yet this persistent shadow clung upon my footsteps until from casting furtive glances sidewise I came to holding it craftily in the tail of my eye. 'Twas surely moving as I moved, and surely drawing nearer. I picked a time and place, measured my distance, and darting suddenly aside, sent home a thrust which should have pinned the phantom to a tree.
"Ugh! What for Captain Long-knife want kill the tree?"
The voice came from behind, and when I wheeled again my shadow was become incarnated in flesh and blood; a stalwart Indian, naked to the belt, standing so near he could have pricked me with his scalping knife.
It was God's mercy that by some swift intuition I knew him for the friendly Catawba. It is an ill thing to take a frighted man unawares.
"Uncanoola?" said I.
He nodded. "Where 'bouts Captain Long-knife going?"
I told him briefly; whereat he shook his head.
"No find Captain Jennif' this way; find himthatway," pointing back along the path.
"How does the chief know that? Has he seen him?" Though my long exile had well-nigh cost me the trick of it, I made shift to drop into the stately Indian hyperbole.
"Wah! Uncanoola has seen the Great Water: that make him have long eyes—see heap things."
"Will the Catawba tell the friend whose life he saved what he has seen?"
"Uncanoola see heap things," he repeated. "See Captain Jennif' so"—he threw himself flat upon the ground and pictured me a fugitive crawling snake-like through the underwood. "Bime-by, come to river and find canoe—jump in and paddle fas'; bime-by, 'gain, stop paddling and laugh and shake fist this way, and say 'God-damn.'"
By this I knew that Jennifer had escaped; nay, more; had somehow learned of my escape and was seeking me.
"Is that all the chief saw?" I asked.
"Ugh! See heap more things: see one thing white squaw no let him tell Captain Long-knife. Maybe some time tell, anyhow."
"The white squaw?" said I. "Who is she?"
The Catawba laughed, an Indian laugh, silent and suppressed; a mere shaking of the ribs.
"No can tell that, neither, too," he said. Then, with a swift dart aside from the subject: "Captain Long-knife care much 'bout black dogs yonder?"
I knew he meant the negroes at the hunting lodge.
"The white man cares for the black as a kind master should," I returned.
The Indian spat upon the ground in token of his hatred and contempt for all the black skins in his fatherland. I never understood this bitter race antipathy between the red and black, but 'tis a tale well written out in many a bloody massacre of that earlier day.
"The wolves will kill all the black dogs and drink their blood before the moon is awake. Uncanoola has spoken."
I sheathed my sword and turned to take the backward trace.
"Captain Long-knife will go and fight for his black dogs with wool on their heads?" he queried.
"If need be," I asserted.
"Wah!" he ejaculated, and at the word was gone as if the earth had swallowed him.
I lost no time in indecision. Since Jennifer was abroad, I had no business at the plantations; and if Tomas and the other refugees were like to come to harm, I could do no less than hasten back to warn or help them.
So I retraced my steps, hurriedly, as the business urged; and saw no more shadows in the ancient wood—in truth, had much ado to see the single step ahead, so thickly did the darkness gather in those skyless depths.
I was breasting the last low hill, was come so near that I could hear the murmur of the river, when in the farthest hazy vista of the tree-tops a softened glow appeared, changing the black to green and then to red. 'Twas like the childish Africans, I said, to draw a secret sentry line for safety's sake, and then to build a fire to advertise it far and wide. Truly, the Catawba's wolves might find an easy—
A chattering scream of agony sent shrill and sharp upon the stillness of the night halted me and broke the gibing comment in the midst. I stood and listened. The cry rang out again; then I loosed the Andrea in its scabbard and fell a-running, though the half-healed wound scanted me sorely of the breath I wanted.
The cabin clearing, or rather the thinned-out grove which stood in lieu thereof, was but a niggard acre hemmed in on every side, save that toward the river, by the virgin forest. For cover there were holly thickets here and there, and into one of these I plunged, creeping on hands and knees to gain a hidden view-point.
The scene in the little clearing was one to brand itself in lasting shapes upon the memory. A brush heap newly kindled gave out a dusky glow flaring in waves of smoky red against the over-arching foliage. The open space around the cabin was alive with half-naked savages running to and fro; and in the gloom beyond the fire I saw a shadowy horseman backed by others still more phantom-like.
There was no mystery about it. My enemy had come with sleuth-hound Indians at his back to run me down. The savages were, no doubt, that band of over-mountain Cherokees pledged by their chief to pilot the powder convoy; and by their help the baronet had tracked me.
This was the first thought, caught at in passing; but when I came to look again I saw what had been done. Sprawled on the ground before the burning brush pile, his wrinkled face a hideous mask of suffering, with the eyeballs starting from their sockets in the death-wrench, lay my faithful Darius.
By what inhuman tortures they had made him point the way, or how or why they slew him at the last, I know not, but I made sure it was his death-scream that had halted me and set the stillness of the forest alive with ghastly echoes.
At sight of the stiffening body of the faithful slave you may suppose my blood ran cold and hot by turns, and that his blood cried out for vengeance from the sod that soaked it up. With ten years more of youth and less of age I might have tried to hew my way to Falconnet's stirrup, and so to square accounts with him. But had I been a-mind to rush upon the stage without my cue, another climax in the ghastly tragedy forbade it.
This climax turned upon the capture of my horse-boy, Tomas. The other blacks, it seemed, had made good their escape; but Tomas, lagging behind through fear or foolishness, had given these copper-colored devils leave to run him down and drag him back into the fire light, with yells of savage triumph.
They flung him down upon his knees beside the captain's horse, and though I caught but here and there a word above the frenzied yipping of the Indians, it was plain the baronet was asking him of me.
I could not hear the black boy's gibbering answers, but that he would not tell them what they wished to know—could not, indeed, since I had left no word behind to track me by—was quickly evident. A cord was found, and while I crouched behind the holly screen, aghast and helpless as one against two-score or more, they looped him by the thumbs and swung him up to dangle from a maple bough a musket's length or such a matter before the cabin door.
He bore the torture patiently, as some poor dumb beast suffering at the hand of man, and would not part his lips for all the captain's curses. But this was only the merciful beginning. With yells of savage fury the Indians carried brands to make a slow fire at his feet; and, lest that should not be enough, a brace of them climbed to the roof, tore off the splits for kindling, and set the cabin wall alight behind him.
You may thank God, my dears, that you are living in a kindlier age. Mayhap the savage, now a-march toward the setting sun, is still as pitiless as he was; but not in any corner of the world, I think, would Anglo-Saxon men, wearing the king's or any other uniform, be witnesses unmoved of such a devil's carnival of torment as this that made me nauseate with horror.
As with the stretching of the cord the wretched black spun slowly round and round before the growing blaze, his cries were something terrible to hear. And when the fire light played upon his face it was a sight to freeze the blood: the eyes shut tight against the shriveling heat, the cracking lips drawn back, the black skin changing to a dry and sickly brown. And ever and anon between the shrieks the parched lips shaped a plea: "O Massa! Massa Cap'm! shoot po' nigga and let um die!"
This plea for cruel kindness cut me to the marrow of my bones; and lacking means to save his life, I thought I might at least make shift to try to put him out of misery.
The enemy's dispositions favored me. The savages, drunk with lust of blood, leaped and danced around their victim. Falconnet sat his horse apart beneath the maples, and with his bodyguard of troopers, was well within the borderland of lurid shadow where the fire light mingled with the night.
I crept away and made a swift detour to the right to come behind the rearmost horseman of the troop. As his ill luck would have it, his horse, affrighted at the firelit pandemonium, was in the act of wheeling to run away. Being cumbered with a musket, the man made clumsy work of handling his mount, and when the beast came down in a snorting tremble to rear afresh at sight of me, the man flung away the musket and drew his sword.
In cooler blood I might have given him his soldier's chance, but here again it was another's life or mine. Even so, I might have fought him fair, had he but held his tongue and fought in silence. But this he would not, so I had to quiet him or have the others about my ears upon his shoutings.
That done, I snatched the musket that had cost the man his life, and, staying not to see what should befall, ran back to cover. In the interval of weapon-getting the fire against the cabin wall had gnawed its way from log to log and now was lapping with its yellow tongues beneath the eaves. But lest the victim should not suffer long enough, the Indians were at work in yelling frenzy, flogging the blaze with green branches broken from the trees so that the fire itself should not be merciful.
I waited till the slowly spinning figure of the black should turn and make a mark I could not miss. The pause gave space for some swift steadying of the nerves, but with the colder thought it also brought a fierce and terrible temptation. The finger on the musket's trigger held a life in pawn, and I might pick and choose and say what life I'd take.
I glanced aside at Falconnet. He was a fairer mark than my poor Tomas, and by the laws of God and man had earned his death. The tortured slave had little time to suffer at the worst, and with the bullet that would give him surcease I could well avenge him. More than this; that bullet planted in my enemy's heart would save my lady Margery harmless, leaving me free to go to my own place and so to right the wrong that I had done.
All in the pivoting instant of the pause the musket swung slowly round as of its own volition, and through its sights I saw the slashings, gold on red, across the breasting of his captain's riding coat. One little crooking of the trigger-finger and the lead had gone upon its errand. But at the balancing instant that piteous cry was lifted once again: "O Massa! Massa Cap'm! God 'a' mussy—shoot po' nigga and let 'um die!"
I did as any other man would do, as you have guessed. The great king's musket swept another arc, and roared and belched and spat its messenger of death; and my poor Tomas had the boon he prayed for.
And then, as if the musket flash and roar had been a lodestone and these fierce Cherokees so many bits of steel to cluster thick upon it, I was surrounded in the twinkling of an eye, and whizzing hatchets and rifle bullets whining sibilant were but an earnest of the fate I had invited.
In such a coil as this I'd looped about me there was nothing for it, as it seemed, but to draw the steel and die as a soldier should. So I broke cover on the forest side of the holly thicket with a yell as fierce as theirs, and picked a tree to set my back against, and ran for it.
I never reached the tree. In mid career, when all the Cherokee wolf pack was bursting through the holly tangle at my heels, two men, a white man and an Indian, ran in ahead, as I supposed to cut me off. Just then the dry roof of the hunting lodge roared aflame, reddening the forest far and near. The light was at my back and on the faces of the two who ran to meet me. A great sob swelled in my throat and choked me, but I ran the faster. For these were my dear lad and the friendly Catawba, charging gallantly to cover my retreat.
It was a ready help in time of need. They ran in bravely, the chief ahead, twirling his tomahawk for the throw, with Dick a pace to right and rear, his two great pistols brandished and the grandsire of all the broadswords dangling by a thong at his wrist.
"Follow the chief!" he shouted in passing; and at the word the Catawba stopped short, sent his hatchet whistling into the yapping pack behind me, and swerved to run aside and point the way for me.
Left to myself, I hope I should have had the grace to stand with Jennifer. But at the turning point of indecision the quick-witted Indian read my thought, and snatching the sword from my hand, gave me no choice but to follow him.
So I ran with him; but as I fled I looked behind and saw a sight to put the ancient hero tales to the blush. One man against two-score my brave Dick stood, while through the underwood the mounted soldiery came to make the odds still greater.
He never flinched for all the hurtling missiles sent on ahead to cut him down, nor gave a glance aside to where the horsemen were deploying to surround him. As I looked, the two great pistols belched in the very faces of the nearest Cherokees; and in the momentary check the firearms made, the basket-hilted claymore went to work, rising and falling like a weaver's beam.
I saw no more; but some heart-bursting minutes later, when Jennifer came racing on behind to share the flight his heroic stand had made a possibility, the swelling sob choked me once again; and when I thought of what this his rescue of me meant to him, I could have blubbered like a boy.
But there was little time or space to give remorse an inning. The Cherokees, checked but for the moment, were storming hotly at our heels. And as we ran I heard the shouted command of Falconnet to his mounted men: "A rescue! Right oblique, and head them in the road! Gallop, you devils!"
We ran in Indian file, I at the chief's heels and Jennifer at mine. I followed the Catawba blindly; and being as yet little better than half a man in breath and muscle, was well-nigh spent before we crashed down through a tangled briar thicket into the river road.
We were in time, but with no fraction of a minute to spare. We could hear thepad-pad-padof the light-footed runners close upon us, following now by the noise we made; and on our left the air was trembling to the thunder of the mounted men coming at a break-neck gallop down the road.
"Thank God!" says Richard, with a quick eyeshot to right and left in the lesser gloom of the open. "I was afeard even the chief might miss the place in the dark. Down the bank to the river!—quick, man, and cautious! If they smell us out now, we're no better than buzzard-meat!" And when we reached the water's edge: "You taught me how to paddle a pirogue, Jack; I hope you haven't lost the knack of it yourself."
"No," said I; and the three of us slid the hollowed log into the stream.
We were afloat in shortest order, holding the canoe against the current by clinging to the overhanging trees that fringed the bank; yet with paddles poised for a second dash for freedom should the need arise. I should have dipped forthwith to save the precious minutes, but Jennifer stayed me.
"Hist!" he whispered. "Hold steady and listen. They can not see us from above; mayhap we've thrown them off the scent."
I thought it most unlikely; but his guess was right and mine was wrong. Though any of these savages could lift a trail in daylight, following it at top speed like a trained blood-hound, yet now the darkness baffled them.
So there was some running to and fro in the road above our heads, and then the troopers galloped down. Followed hastily a labored confab through the linguister, broken in the midst by a fury of hot oaths from Falconnet; and then the chase swept on toward the plantations, and we were left to make their losing of us sure by whatsoever means we chose.
We paddled slowly up stream in silence, keeping well within the blacker shadow of the tree fringe. When we came opposite the glowing ruins of the hunting lodge, Jennifer backed upon his paddle.
"You'll go ashore?" said he.
I said I would, adding: "They have slaughtered poor old Darius, and I am loath to leave his bones for the buzzards to pick."
He made no comment other than to swear in sympathy. When the pirogue grounded, the Indian was out like a cat, to vanish phantom-wise among the trees. I followed in some clumsier fashion, leaving Jennifer to keep the canoe; but half way up the hill he joined me, and would not turn back for all my urging. "No; hang me if I'll let you out of eye-grip again," was all he would say; and so we went together, and were together at the seeing of what the glowing ember-heap would show us.
Poor Tomas had his sepulture already. His cord had burned in two and let him down so close beside the cabin wall that all the blazing debris from the overhanging eaves had made his funeral pile. Darius lay as I had last seen him; and him we buried in the maize clearing at the back, with the ember glow for funeral lights.
It was a chanceful thing to do. Since the Cherokees had left their dead and wounded, and Falconnet the body of his trooper who had yielded me the musket, there was small doubt they would return. Yet we had time to dig a shallow grave for my old henchman; to dig and fill it up again; and afterward to make a circuit round the burning pile to reach the river side once more.
When we had launched the canoe, and were afloat and ready for the start, the Catawba was still missing.
"Where is the chief, think you?" I asked; but Dick's answer, if, indeed, he gave me any, was lost in a chorus of ear splitting yells rending the silence of the night like demon cries. Then a single ululation, long drawn and fair blood chilling, answered back, and Jennifer swept the pirogue stern to strand with a quick paddle stroke.
"That last was Uncanoola's war cry; they've doubled back in time to catch him at it!" he cried. "Stand by to drive her when I give the word! Here he comes!"
Down the sloping hillside, looking, in the red glow of the ember heap, more like a flying demon than a man, came the Catawba, one hand gripping the scalping-knife, the other flung aloft to flaunt his terrible trophies in sight of his pursuers. They were so close upon him that waiting promised death for all of us; so Jennifer dipped again to send the canoe a broad jump from the bank.
"Ready!" he cried. "He'll take the water like a fish, and we can pick him up afterward—Now!"
I heard the clean-cut dive of the Indian, and struck the paddle deep to balance Jennifer's stroke. But as I bent to put my back into it, some flying missile caught me fair behind the ear, and but for Jennifer's quick wit I should have swamped the crazy shallop. In a flash he jerked me flat between his knees and sent the pirogue with a mighty thrust beyond the zone of fire light.
At that, though all the sense was beaten out of me, I was alive enough to hear the savage yells of disappointed rage behind us; these and the spitting crackle of a dozen rifles fired at random in the darkness. But afterward all sounds, save the rhythmic dip and drip of Jennifer's paddle, faded on the sense of hearing till, as it would seem, this gentle monody of dipping blade and tinkling drops became a crooning lullaby to blot out all the years that lay between, and make me once again a little child sinking asleep in my young mother's arms.
'Tis a sure mark of healthful sleep that it never makes account of time. No odds how long the night, 'tis but a moment from the lapse of consciousness to its recovery in the morning. But this deep sleep that crept upon me as I lay in the pirogue, listening to the tinkling drip from Jennifer's paddle, was not of healthful weariness; and when I came awake from it there was a dim and troubled vista of vague and broken dreams to measure off the longest night I could ever remember.
The place of this awakening was a burrow in the earth. My bed of bearskins over fragrant pine-tufts was spread upon the ground, and by the flickering light of a handful of fire I could see the earth walls of the burrow, which were worn smooth as if the place had been the well-used den of some wild creature. But overhead there was the mark of human occupancy, since the earth-arch was sooted and blackened with the reek of many fires.
When I stirred there was another stir beyond the handful of fire, and Jennifer came to kneel beside me, taking my hand and chafing it as a tender-hearted woman might, and asking if I knew him.
"Know you? Why should I not?" I said, wondering why the words took so many breaths between.
"O Jack!" was all I had in answer; but when he had found a tongue to babble out his joy, I learned the why and wherefore. Once more grim death had reached for me, lying await in the twirled tomahawk that set me dreaming of my mother's lap and lullaby. For a week I had lain here upon the bed of pine-tufts, poised upon the brink of the death pit with only my dear lad to hold and draw me back.
"A week?" I queried, when he had named the interval. "And you have been here all the time?"
"I've never left you, save to forage for the pot," he admitted. "I dared not leave you, Jack."
"But where are we?" I would ask.
"In a den on the river's edge, a mile or more above your sacked cabin. 'Tis some dodge-hole hollowed out by the Catawbas long ago and shared since by them and the bears, judging from the stinking reek of it. Uncanoola steered me hither the night of the raid."
"Then the chief came off safely?" I said, falling into a dumb and impotent rage that the saying of two words should scant me so of strength to say a third.
"Right as a trivet—scalps and all," laughed Jennifer. "He'll be the envy of every warrior in the tribe when he vaunts himself at the Catawbas' council fire."
I let it rest a while at that, casting about for words to shape a hungrier question.
"Have you no news?" I asked, at length.
"Little or none," he answered shortly.
"But you have had some word—some news—from Appleby Hundred?" I stammered feebly.
"Nothing you'd care to hear," he rejoined, evasively, I thought. "'Tis as you left it, save that Tarleton whipped away to the south again as suddenly as he came, and our cursing baronet has made the manor house his headquarters in fact, lodging himself and all his troop on Mr. Stair. From his lying quiet and keeping the Cherokees in tow, there will be some deviltry afoot, I'll warrant."
I knew that Falconnet was waiting for the powder cargo, but another matter crowded this aside.
"But—but Margery?" I queried, on sharpest tenter-hooks to know how much or little he had heard.
I thought his brow darkened at the question, but mayhap it was only a shadow cast by the flickering fire. At any rate, he laughed hardily.
"She is well—and well content, I dare swear. 'Twas only yesterday I saw her taking the air on the river road, with Falconnet for an escort. You told me once he had a sure hand with the women and it made me mad; but, truly, I have come to think you drew it mild, Jack."
Now though I could ply a decent ready blade, or keep a firing line from lurching at a pinch, I had not learned to put a snaffle on a blundering tongue, as I have said before.
"Damn him as you please, Dick, and he'll warrant it. But you must not judge the lady over harshly, nor always by appearances. She may have flouted you as a boyish lover, and yet I think—"
I stopped in sheer bewilderment, shot through and through with keenest agonies of remorseful recollection. For at the moment I had clean forgot the gulf impassable I had set between these two. So I would have lapsed into shamed silence, but Jennifer would not suffer it.
"Well, what is it that you think?" he demanded.
"I think—nay, I may say I know that she thinks well of you, Dick," I blundered on, seeing no way to put him off.
He gripped my hand, and in his eyes there was the light of the old love reawakening.
"Don't lift me up to fling me down again, Jack! How can you know what she thinks of me?" he broke in, eagerly.
I should have told him then all there was to tell. He had been thrice my savior, and his heart was soft and malleable on the side of friendship. I knew it—knew that the pregnant moment for full confession had arrived; and yet I could not force my tongue to shape the words. Indeed, I saw more clearly than before that never any word of mine could make him understand that I was not a faithless traitor in intention. So I paltered with the truth, like any wretched coward of them all.
"You forget that I have come to know her well," I said. "I was a month or more under the same roof with her, and in that time she told me many things."
Now, this witless speech was no better than a whip to flog him on.
"What things?" he questioned, promptly.
"Oh, many things. She spoke often of you."
"What did she say of me, Jack? Tell me what she said," he begged. "It can make no difference now; she is less than nothing to me—nay,'tis even worse than that, since she would play Delilah if she could. But oh, Jack, I love her!—I should love her if I stood on the gallows and she stood by to spring the drop and turn me off!"
Truly, if the lash of remorse had lacked its keenest thong, this passionate outburst of his would have added it. None the less, I must needs be weaker than water and fall back another step and put him off.
"Another time, Richard. I am strangely unnerved and dizzy-headed now. By and by, when I am stronger, I will tell you all."
Taking a reproach where none was meant, he sprang up with a self-aimed malison upon his lack of care for me, stirred the fire alive and brewed me a most delicious-smelling cup of broth. And afterward, when I had drunk the broth with some small beckonings of returning appetite, he spread his coat to screen me from the fire light and would have driven me to sleep again.
"At any rate, you shall not talk," he promised. "If you are wakeful I will talk to you and tell you what little I have gleaned about the fighting."
His news was chiefly a later repetition of Father Matthieu's and Captain Abram Forney's, but there was this to add: the Congress had appointed the Englishman, Horatio Gates, chief of the army in the South, and this new leader was on his way to take command.
De Kalb, with the Maryland and Delaware lines and Colonel Armand's legion, was encamped on Deep River, waiting for the newly-appointed general; and Caswell and Griffith Rutherford, with the militia, were already pressing forward to some handgrips with my Lord Cornwallis in the South.
Nearer at hand, the partizan war-fire flamed afresh wherever a Tory company met a patriot, and there were wicked doings, more like savage massacres than fair-fought battles of the soldier sort.
When he had made an end of his small war budget, I set him on to tell me how he came to be at hand to help me so in the nick of time on the night of the cabin sack.
"'Twas partly chance," he said. "A redcoat troop had me in durance at Jennifer House, and while they affected to hold me at parole, I never gave consent to that, and so was kept a prisoner. They shut me in the wine-bin with a guard, and when the fellow was well soaked and silly, I bound and gagged him and broke jail. I took the river for it, meaning to outlie until the hue and cry was over; and just at dusk Uncanoola dropped upon me and told me of your need. From that to helping him cut you out of your raffle with the Cherokees was but a hand's turn in the day's work."
"A lucky turn for me," I said; and then at second thought I would deny the saying, though not for him to hear. But this was dangerous ground again, and I clawed off from it like a desperate mariner tempest-driven on a lee shore; asking him how he had learned the broadsword play, and where he got the antique claymore.
He laughed heartily, and more like my care-free Dick, this time.
"Thereby hangs a tale. I told you how I was out with the Minute Men in '76 at Moore's Creek, where we fought the Scotchmen. It was our first pitched battle, and I opine it smelled somewhat of severity on both sides—no quarter was asked, and the Tory MacDonalds fought like fiends for King George, small cause as they had to love the House of Hanover."
"How was that?" I would ask, being as little familiar with the low country settlements as any native-born Carolinian could be.
"They were expatriates for the Pretender's sake, many of them. Mistress Flora's husband was one of the prisoners we took. But, as I was saying, they were Tories to a man, and they fought wickedly. When it was over, the prisoners would have fared hardly but for a woman. In the thick of the fight, Mistress Mary Slocumb, of Dobbs, whose husband was with us, came storming down upon the field, having rode a-gallop some forty-odd miles because she dreamed her goodman was killed. She begged for the prisoners, and so Caswell hanged only those who were blood guilty—these and the house burners. A raw-boned piper named M'Gillicuddy fell to my lot, and he is now my majordomo at Jennifer House; as honest a fellow as ever skirled a pibroch."
"That was like you," I said; "to make a friend and retainer out of your prisoner. And so this Highland piper has been your fencing master, has he?"
"'Twas he taught me what little I know of the claymore play; and this stout old blade is his. 'Tis as good as a woodman's ax when you have the knack of swinging it."
"Truly," said I. "Also, you seemed to have the knack, and the strength as well, in spite of the crippled arm you were carrying in a sling the night before when they haled you into Colonel Tarleton's court at Appleby."
"A little ruse of war," he said, laughing and making a fist to show me his arm was strong and sound again. "'Twas M'Gillicuddy put me up to it, saying they would be like to deal the gentler with a wounded man. But how came you to know?"
Here was another chance to tell him what he should be told, but the words would not say themselves.
"I stood within arm's reach of you that night," said I; and from that I hastened swiftly through the story of my trial as a spy and what it came to in the morning, and never mentioned Margery's part in it at all.
"You have a bitter enemy in Frank Falconnet," was his comment, when I had made an end of this recounting of my adventures. "He knows you are in hiding hereabouts, and has been scouring the neighborhood well for you—or, more belike, for both of us."
"How do you know this?" I asked.
"I have both seen and heard. This den of ours opens on the river's edge, and, two days since, his Indians came within an ace of nabbing me. 'Twas just at dusk, and I made out to dodge them by doubling past in the canoe."
"But you say you have heard, as well?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"Don't ask me, Jack."
I said I had no right to ask more than he chose to tell; and at this he blurted out an oath and let me have the sharp-edged truth.
"Falconnet has an ally whose wit is shrewder than his. Can you guess who it is?"
"No."
"'Tis this same Madge Stair you have been defending, Jack," he said, bitterly. "It seems that Falconnet made sure we had both gone to join the army, which was but natural. If she were less than the spiteful little Tory vixen that she is, she would have been content to let it rest so. But she would not let it rest so. With her own lips she assured Falconnet he still had us to reckon with; nay, more—she made a boast of it that we would never go so far away from her."
Weak and fever-shaken as I was, I yet made shift to get upon my elbow feebly fierce, denouncing it hotly for a lie.
"Who slandered her like this, Dick? Put a name to the cur, and as I live and get my strength again, I'll hunt him down and choke him with that lie!"
"Nay," he objected soberly; "that would be my quarrel, were there ever a peg to hang a quarrel on. But it came by a sure hand, and one that is friendly enough to all concerned. An old free borderer, Ephraim Yeates by name, brought me the tale. He had been spying round at Appleby Hundred, wanting to know, for some purpose of his own, why the redcoats and Cherokees were hanging on so long; and this much he overheard one night when he was outlying under the window of the withdrawing-room. He says she was in a pretty passion at the baronet's slackness, stamping her foot at him and lashing him with the taunt that he was afeard of one or both of us."
I fell back on the bearskins to shut my eyes and call up all the might of love to grapple with this fresh misery. It was in this fierce conflict of faith against apparent fact that I descried the parting of the ways for the lover and the husband.
Jennifer believed this most incredible thing, and yet he loved her—would go on loving her, as he had said, in spite of all. That was the lover's road, and I could never bear him company on it. Could I believe her so pitiless cruel as this, I made sure no husband-love could live beyond that moment of conviction.
But at this perilous pass the husband's road ran truer than the lover's. Richard believed her capable of this hard-hearted thing and went on loving her blindly in spite of it. But as for me, I said I would never give belief an inch of standing-room; that had I stood in Ephraim Yeates's shoes, having the witness of my own eyes and ears, I would still have found excuse and exculpation for her.
I stole a glance at Jennifer. He was sitting with his face in his hands, a silent figure of a strong man humbled. He had called her a Delilah, and the green withes of her binding cut sore into the flesh.
"You say you love her, Dick; can you believe her capable of this, and yet go on loving her?" I asked.
He let me see his face. It was haggard and grief-marred.
"I'd pay the devil's own price could I say 'no' to that, Jack. But I can not."
"Then I swear I love her better than you do, Richard Jennifer. She hates me well—God knows she has good cause to hate me fiercely; yet I would trust her with my life."
I looked to see him pin me down at this; and though the words had fairly shaped and said themselves, I laid fast hold of my courage and was prepared to make them good. But he would only smile and draw the bearskin cover over me, tucking me in as tenderly as a mother, and saying very gently:
"So she has bewitched you, too; and now there are two poor fools of love instead of one. But you are stronger than I, Jack. You will break the spell and put it down and live beyond it, and that I never shall—God help me!" And with that, he went to his own bed beside the fire, telling me I must lie quiet and try to sleep.
I did lie quiet, but sleep came not, nor did I woo it. For long past the time when I could hear his measured breathing, I lay awake to plan how I might draw the baronet's man-hunt to myself, and so free my loyal Richard of the peril that by rights was mine.