For some few days after Jennifer's narrow escape at the entrance to our hiding place, the Cherokees were hot upon our scent, quartering the forest on both banks of the river, determined, as it seemed, to hunt or starve us out.
It was in this time of siege that I came to know, as I had not known before, the depth and tenderness of my dear lad's love for me. While the life-tide was at its ebb and I was querulous and helpless weak, he was my leech and nurse and heartening friend in one. And later, when the tide was fairly turned and I had found my soldier's appetite again, he spent many of the nights abroad and never let me guess what risks he ran to fetch me dainties from the outer world.
In this night raiding no danger was too great to hold him back from serving me. Once, when we were washing down our evening meal of meat and maize cake with plain cold water, I mourned the good wine idling in its bin at Jennifer House. At that, without a word to me, he took the whole night for a perilous adventure and fetched a dozen bottles of the Jennifer port to make me choke and strangle at the thought of what its bringing had cost in toil and hazard.
Another time I spoke of English beef, saying how it would rebuild a man at need—how it had made the English soldier what he is. Whereupon, as before, my loving forager took a hint where none was intended; was gone the night long, and slaughtered me some Tory yearling,—'twas Mr. Gilbert Stair's, I mistrusted, though Dick would never name the owner, and so I had a sirloin to my breakfast.
In these and many other ways he spent himself freely for love of me. If he had been a younger brother of my own blood the common parentage could not have made him tenderer.
'Twas not the mere outgushing of a nature open-armed to make a bosom friend of all the world; nor any feminine softness on his part. If I have drawn him thus my pen is but a clumsy quill, for he was manly-rough and masterful, with all the native strength and vigor of the border-born.
But on the side of love and friendship no woman ever had a truer heart, a keener eye or a lighter hand. And in a service for friend or mistress he would spend himself as recklessly as those old knights you read about who made a business of their chivalry.
With his daily offerings of unselfishness to shame me, you may be sure that I was flayed alive; self-flogged like a miserable monk, with all the woundings of the whip well salted by remorse. As you have guessed, I had not yet summoned up the courage to tell him how I had staked his chance of happiness upon a casting of the die of fate—staked and lost it. Now that it was gone, I saw how I had missed the golden opportunity; how I had weakly hesitated when delay could only make the telling harder.
By tacit consent we never spoke of Margery. Richard's silence hung upon despair, I thought; and as for mine, since the husband's road and the lover's lay so far apart, I could not bring myself to speak of her. But she was always first in my thoughts in that time of convalescence, as I made sure she was in his; and at the last the hidden thing between us was brought to light.
It was on a night some three weeks or more after my fever turn. Our larder had run low again, and Jennifer had spent the earlier hours of the night abroad—to little purpose, as it chanced. 'Twas midnight or thereabouts when he came swearing in to tell me that the Tories were out again to harry our side of the river afresh, and to make a refugee's begging of a bag of meal a thing of peril.
"They'll starve us out in shortest measure at this rate," he prophesied. "They have trampled down all the standing corn for miles around, and this morning they burned the mill. 'Tis our notice to quit, and we'd best take it. There has been fighting to the south of us—a plenty of it—at Rocky Mount and Hanging Rock, and elsewhere, and every man is needed. If you are strong enough to stand the march, we'll run the gantlet down the river in the pirogue and cut across from the lower ford to join Major Davie or Mr. Gates."
I said I was fit enough, and would do whatever he thought best. And then I took a step upon the forbidden ground.
"Falconnet is still at Appleby Hundred?" I said.
He nodded.
"And you will join the army at the front and leave Margery to his tender mercies?"
His laugh was bitter; so bitter that I scarce knew it for Richard Jennifer's.
"Mistress Margery Stair is well, and well content, as I told you once before. She has no wish for you or me, unless it be to see us well hanged."
"Nay, Richard; you judge her over-harshly. I fear you do not love her as her lover should."
"Say you so? Listen: to-night I got as far as the manor house, being fool enough to risk my neck for another sight of her. God help me, Jack! I had it. They have scraped together all the Tory riff-raff this side of the river—Falconnet and the others—and are holding high revel at Appleby. Since it is still our true-blue borderland, they are scant enough of women of their own kidney, and I saw Madge dancing like any light o' love with every jackanapes that offered."
"In her father's house she could not well do less," I averred, cut to the heart, as he was, and yet without his younger lover's jealousy to make me unjust.
"Or more," he added, savagely. "'Tis as I say; she lacks nothing we can give her, and we'd as well be off about our business."
I think he never had it in his heart to leave her in any threat of danger. But from his point of view there was no danger threatening her save that which she seemed willing enough to rush upon—a life of titled misery as Lady Falconnet. I saw how he would see it; saw, too, that his was the saner summing of it up. And yet—
He broke into my musings with a pointed question. "What say you, Jack? 'Tis but a little whiffet of a Tory jade who cares not the snap of her finger for either of us. The night is fine and dark. Shall we float the canoe and give them all the slip?"
This was how it came to turn upon a "yes" or "no" of mine. I hesitated, I know not why. In the little pause the fire burned low between us, and the shadows deepened in the burrow cavern until they strangled the eye as mephitic vapors scant a man of breath. The silence, too, was stifling. There was no sound to breach it save the gurgling murmur of the river, and this was subdued and intermittent like the death-rattle in the throat of the dying.
I've always made a scoff of superstition, and yet, my dears, a thousand questions in this life of ours must hang answerless to the crack of doom if you deny it standing-room. I knew no more than I have set down here of Margery's besetment; nay, I had every reason Richard Jennifer had to believe that she was well and well content, lacking nothing, save, mayhap, the freedom to marry where she chose.
And yet, out of the stifling silence there came a sudden cry for help; a cry voiceless to the outward ear, but sharp and piercing to that finer inward sense; a cry so real that I would start and listen, marveling that Jennifer made no sign of having heard it.
In the harkening instant there was a faint twang like the thrumming of a distant harp string, and then the grave-like silence was rent smartly by the whistling hiss of an arrow, the shaft passing evenly between us and scattering the handful of fire where it struck.
Jennifer came alive with a start, leaping up with a malediction between his teeth upon our dallying.
"Too late, by God!" he cried. "They've trapped us like a pair of blind moles!" And with that he caught up the ancient broadsword, only to swear again when he found no room to swing it in.
Having the handier weapon, I slipped out before him, creeping on hands and knees till I could see the leafy screen at the den's mouth, and the shimmering reflection of the stars upon the water beyond it. There was no sight nor sound of any enemy, and the canoe lay safe as Jennifer had left it.
To make assurance sure, I would have scrambled to the bank above; but at the moment Jennifer hallooed softly to me, and so I crept back into the burrow.
"See here," he said, excitedly. "What a devil will you make of this?"
He had drawn the scattered embers together, fanning them ablaze again, and had sought and found the arrow. It was a blunt-head reed and no war shaft. And around the middle of it, tightly wrapped and tied with silken threads, was a little scroll of parchment.
"'Tis the Catawba's arrow," said Jennifer, though how he knew I could not guess; and then he cut the threads to free the scroll.
Unrolled and spread at large, the parchment proved to be that map of Captain Stuart's that I had found and lost again. And on the margin of it was my note to Jennifer, written in that trying moment when the bribed sentry waited at the door and my sweet lady stood trembling beside me, murmuring her "Holy Marys."
"Read it," said I. "It explains itself. Tarleton had laid me by the heels to wait for the hangman, and I would have passed the word about the Indian-arming on to you. But my messenger was overhauled, and—"
"Yes, yes," he broke in; "I've spelled it out. But this line added at the bottom—surely, that is never your crabbed fist. By heaven! 'tis in Madge's hand!"
He knelt to hold it closer to the flickering firelight, and we deciphered it together. It was but a line, as he had said, with neither greeting nor leave-taking, address nor signature.
"If this should come into the hands of any true-hearted gentleman"—here was a blot as if the pen had slipped from the fingers holding it; and then, in French, the very wording of the inarticulate cry that had come to me out of the darkness and silence: "A moi! pour l'amour de Dieu!"
We fell apart, each to his own side of the handful of embers.
"You make it out?" said I, after a moment of strained silence.
He nodded. "She has prattled the parlez-vous to me ever since we were boy and maid together."
A full minute more of the threatening silence, and at the end of it we were glaring at each other like two wild creatures crouching for the spring.
It was Jennifer who spoke first. "'Twas meant for me," he said; and his voice had the warning of a mastiff's growl in it.
"No!" said I, curtly.
"I say it was!"
"Then you say the thing which is not."
Had I been Richard Jennifer, I know not what bitter reproach I should have found to hurl at the man who had thrice owed his life to me. But he said no word of what had gone before.
"You may give me the lie, if you like, John Ireton; I shall not strike you." He said it slowly, but his face was gray with anger. Then he added, hotly: "You know well that word was meant for me!"
At this—God forgive me!—my jealous wrath broke bounds and I cursed him for a beardless coxcomb who must needs think he stood alone in the eye of every woman he should meet. "She needs a man!" I raged, lost now to every sense of decent justice, "a man, I say! And to whom would she send if not to her—"
I choked upon the word. He had risen with me, and we stood face to face in that grim earth-womb, snarling fiercely at each other across the narrow firelit space; two men with every tie to knit us close together, and yet—God save us all!—a pair of wild beasts strung up to the killing pitch because, forsooth, we must needs front each other across a deadline drawn by the finger of a woman!
God knows what would have come of all this had my dear lad been as fierce a fool as I. 'Twas his good common sense that saved us both, I think, for when the savage rival madness was at its height he turned away, swearing we were the very pick and choice of a world of asses to stand thus feeling for each other's throats when, mayhap, the lady needed both of us.
This brought me to my senses at a gallop, as you would guess; to them and to the lighting of the conscience fire within whereon to grill the wicked heart that but now had thirsted for a brother's blood.
"Now God have mercy on us both!" I groaned. "Forgive me, Dick, if you can; I was as mad as any Bedlamite. If I have any claim on her, 'tis not of her good will, you may be sure. You have the baronet to fear—not me."
He shook his head and pointed to the parchment—to the line in French.
"Francis Falconnet was under the same roof with her—or at least in easy call—when she wrote that, Jack. He is no longer my rival—nor yours."
His word set me thinking, and I would fall to picking out the strands that jealous wrath had woven for me into the web of happenings. Setting aside the story brought by Ephraim Yeates, there was no certain proof that she had ever favored the Englishman; nay, more, till I had come to be madly jealous of Falconnet, I had made sure that Jennifer was the favored one.
At this, as one sees a landscape struck out clear and vivid by the lightning's flash, I saw the true meaning of the word the hunter had brought—saw it and went upon my knees to grope blindly for the sword I had let fall when Dick had found the arrow.
"What is it, Jack?" he asked, gently.
"My sword!" I gasped. "We should have been half-way there by this. Yeates was misled. 'Tis Falconnet she fears. She was at bay—hark you, at bay and fair desperate. That word of hers to the baronet was her poor pitiful defiance built on her trust in us, and we have lain here—"
He found the sword and thrust it into my hand, crying:
"Come on! You can strew the dust and ashes on me later. You said you loved her the better, and I do believe it now, Jack! You trusted her, as I did not. We'll fight as one man to cut her out of this coil, whatever it may be; and after that is done I'll make my bow and leave you a fair field."
"Nay, nay; that you shall not, Dick," I began; but he was half-way through the narrow passage to the open, trailing the ancient broadsword and the bearskin from his bed; and I was fain to follow quickly, leaving the protest all unfinished.
As near as might be guessed, it wanted yet an hour or two of daybreak when we made a landing within the boundaries of Appleby Hundred, and beached and hid the pirogue in the bushes.
Of the down-stream flitting through the small hours of the warm midsummer night there is no sharp-etched picture on the memory page. As I recall it, no spoken word of Jennifer's or mine came in to break the rhythm of the hasting voyage. Our paddles rose and fell, dipping and sweeping in unison as if we two, kneeling in bow and stern, were separate halves of some relentless mechanism driven by a single impulse. Overhead the starlit dome circled solemnly to the right or left to match the windings of the stream. On each hand the tree-fringed shores sped backward in the gloom; and beneath the light shell of poplar wood that barely kissed the ripples in passing, the river lapped and gurgled, chuckling weirdly at the paddle plungings, and swirling aft in the longer reaches to point at us down the lengthening wake with a wavering finger silver-tipped in the wan starlight.
With the canoe safely hidden at the landing place, which was some little distance from that oak grove where I had twice kept tryst with death, we set out for the manor house, skulking Indian fashion through the wood; and, when we reached the in-fields, looking momently to come upon a sentry.
Thinking the approaches from the road and river would be better guarded than that from the wood, we skirted a widespread thicket tangle, spared by my father twenty years before to be a grouse and pheasant cover, and fetching a compass of half a mile or more across the maize fields, came in among the oaks and hickories of the manor grounds.
Still there was no sight nor sound of any enemy; no light of candles at the house, or of camp-fires beneath the trees.
A little way within the grove, where the interlacing tree-tops made the darkness like Egyptian night, Jennifer went on all fours to feel around as if in search of something on the sward. Whereat I called softly to know what he would be at.
He rose, muttering, half as to himself: "I thought I'd never be so far out of reckoning." Then to me: "A few hours since, the Cherokees were encamped just here. You are standing in the ashes of their fire."
"So?" said I. "Then they have gone?"
"Gone from this safely enough, to be sure. They have been gone some hours; the cinders are cold and dew wet."
"So much the better," I would say, thinking only that now there would be the fewer enemies to fight.
He clipt my arm suddenly, putting the value of an oath into his gripping of it.
"Come awake, man; this is no time to be a-daze!" His whisper was a sharp behest, with a shake of the gripped arm for emphasis. "If the Indians are gone, it means that the powder train has come and gone, too."
"Well?" said I.
I was still thinking, with less than a clod's wit, that this would send the baronet captain about his master's business, and so Margery would have surcease of him for a time, at least. But Jennifer fetched me awake with another whip-lash word or two.
"Jack! has the night's work gone to your head? If Falconnet has got his marching orders you may be sure he's tried by hook or crook to play 'safe bind, safe find,' with Madge. By heaven! 'twas that she was afeard of, and we are here too late! Come on!"
With that he faced about and ran; and forgetting to loose his grip on my arm, took me with him till I broke away to have my sword hand free. So running, we came presently to the open space before the house, and, truly, it was well for us that the place was clean deserted; for by this we had both forgot the very name of prudence.
Jennifer outran me to the door by half a length, and fell to hammering fiercely on the panel with the pommel of his broadsword.
"Open! Mr. Stair; open!" he shouted, between the batterings; but it was five full minutes before the fan-light overhead began to show some faint glimmerings of a candle coming from the rooms beyond.
Richard rested at that, and in the pause a thin voice shrilled from within.
"Be off, you runagates! Off, I say! or I fire upon ye through the door!"
Giving no heed to the threat, Dick set up his clamor again, calling out his name, and bidding the old man open to a friend. In some notching of the hubbub I heard the unmistakable click of a gun-flint on steel. There was barely time to trip my reckless batterer and to fall flat with him on the door-stone when a gun went off within, and a handful of slugs, breaching the oaken panel at the height of a man's middle, went screeching over us.
Before I knew what he would be at, Richard was up with an oath, backing off to hurl himself, shoulder on, against the door. It gave with a splintering crash, letting him in headlong. I followed less hastily. It was as black as a setter's mouth within, the gun fire having snuffed the old man's candle out. But we had flint and steel and tinder-box, and when the punk was alight, Jennifer found the candle under foot and gave it me. It took fire with a fizzing like a rocket fuse, and was well blackened with gunpowder. When the flint had failed to bring the firing spark, the old man had set his piece off with the candle flame.
We found him in the nook made by the turn of the stair, flung thither, as it seemed, by the recoil of the great bell-mouthed blunderbuss which he was still clutching. The fall had partly stunned him, but he was alive enough to protest feebly that he would take a dozen oaths upon his loyalty to the cause; that he had mistook us for some thieving marauders of the other side; craftily leaving cause and party without a name till he should have his cue from us.
Whereupon Richard loosed his neckcloth to give him better breathing space, and bidding me see if the revelers had left a heel-tap of wine in any bottle nearer than the wine cellar, lifted the old man and propped him in the corner of the high-backed hall settle.
The wine quest led me to the banqueting-room. Here disorder reigned supreme. The table stood as the roisterers had left it; the very wreck and litter of a bacchanalian feast. Bottles, some with the necks struck off, were scattered all about, and the floor was stained and sticky with spilt wine and well sanded with shattered glass.
I found a remnant draining in one of the broken bottles, and a cup to pour it in; and with this salvage from the wreck returned to Jennifer and his charge. The old man had come to some better sensing of things,—he had been vastly more frightened than hurt, as I suspected,—and to Richard's eager questionings was able to give some feebly querulous replies.
"Yes, they're gone—all gone, curse 'em; and they've taken every plack and bawbee they could lay their thieving hands upon," he mumbled. "'Tis like the dogs; to stay on here and eat and drink me out of house and home, and then to scurry off when I'm most like to need protection."
"But Madge?" says Richard. "Is she safe in bed?"
"She's a jade!" was all the answer he got. Then the old man sat up and peered around the end of the settle to where I stood, cup and bottle in hand. "'Tis a Christian thought," he quavered. "Give me a sup of the wine, man."
I served him and had a Scottish blessing for my wastefulness, because, forsooth, the broken bottle spilt a thimbleful in the pouring. I saw he did not recognize me, and was well enough content to let it rest thus.
Richard suffered him to drink in peace, but when the cup was empty he renewed his asking for Margery. At this the master of the house, heartened somewhat by my father's good madeira, made shift to get upon his feet in some tremulous fashion.
"Madge, d'ye say? She's gone; gone where neither you nor that dour-faced deevil that befooled us all will find her soon, I promise you, Dickie Jennifer!" he snapped; and I gave them my back and stumbled blindly to the door, making sure his next word would tell my poor wronged lad all that he should have learned from never any other lips but mine own. But Richard himself parried the impending stroke of truth, saying:
"So she is safe and well, Mr. Stair, 'tis all I ask to know."
"She is safe enough; safer by far than you are at this minute, my young cock-a-hoop rebel, now that the king—God save him!—has his own again."
I turned quickly on the broad door-stone to look within. Out of doors the early August dawn was graying mistily overhead, but in the house the sputtering tallow dip still struggled feebly with the gloom. They stood facing each other, these two, my handsome lad, the pick and choice of a comely race, looking, for all his toils and vigils, fresh and fit; and the old man in his woolen dressing-gown, his wig awry, and his lean face yellow in the candle-light.
"How is that you say, Mr. Stair?" says Dick. "The king—but that is only the old Tory cry. There will never be a king again this side of the water."
The old man reached out and hooked a lean finger in the lad's buttonhole. "Say you so, Richard Jennifer? Then you will never have heard the glorious news?" This with a leer that might have been of triumph or the mere whetting of gossip eagerness—I could not tell.
"No," says Richard, with much indifference.
"Hear it, then. 'Twas at Camden, four days since. They came together in the murk of the Wednesday morning, my Lord Cornwallis and that poor fool Gates. De Kalb is dead; your blethering Irishman, Rutherford, is captured; and your rag-tag rebel army is scattered to the four winds. And that's not all. On the Friday, Colonel Tarleton came up with Sumter at Fishing Creek and caught him napping. Whereupon, Charlie McDowell and the over-mountain men, seeing all was lost, broke their camp on the Broad and took to their heels, every man jack of them for himself. So ye see, Dickie Jennifer, there's never a cursed corporal's guard left in either Carolina to stand in the king's way."
He rattled all this off glibly, like a child repeating some lesson got by heart; but when I would have found a grain of comfort in the hope that it was a farrago of Falconnet's lies, Jennifer made the truth appear in answer to a curt question.
"'Tis beyond doubt?—all this, Mr. Stair?"
The old loyalist—loyalist now, if never certainly before—sat down on the settle and laughed; a dry wizened cackle of a laugh that sounded like the crumpling of new parchment.
"You'd best be off, light foot and tight foot, Master Richard, lest you learn shrewdly for yourself. 'Tis in everybody's mouth by this. There were some five-and-forty of the king's friends come together here no longer ago than yestere'en to drink his Majesty's health, and eh, man! but it will cost me a pretty penny! Will that satisfy ye?"
"Yes," said Jennifer, thinking, mayhap, as I did, that nothing short of gospel-true news would have sufficed to unlock this poor old miser's wine cellar.
"Well, then; you'd best be off while you may; d'ye hear? I bear ye no ill-will, Richard Jennifer; and if Mr. Tarleton lays hold of you, you'll hang higher than Haman for evading your parole, I promise you. We'll say naught about this rape of the door-lock, though 'tis actionable, sir, and I'll warn you the law would make you smart finely for it. But we'll enter anolle prosequion that till you're amnestied and back, then you can pay me the damage of the broken lock and we'll cry quits."
At this my straightforward Richard snorted in wrathful derision. However much he loved the daughter, 'twas clear he had small regard for the father.
"Seeing we came to do you a service, Mr. Stair, I think we may set the blunderbuss and the handful of slugs over against the smashed door. And that fetches me back to our errand here. You say Madge is safe. Does that mean that you have spirited her away since last night?"
"Dinna fash yoursel' about Madge, Richard Jennifer. She's meat for your betters, sir!" rasped the old man, lapsing into the mother tongue, as he did now and then in fear or anger.
"Still I would know what you mean when you say she is safe," says Richard, whose determination to crack a nut was always proportioned to the hardness of the shell.
Gilbert Stair cursed him roundly for an impertinent jackanapes, and then gave him his answer.
"'Tis none of your business, Dickie Jennifer, but you may know and be hanged to you! She rode home with the Witherbys last night after the rout, and will be by this safe away in t'other Carolina where your cursed Whiggeries darena lift head or hand."
"Of her own free will?" Dick persisted.
"Damme! yes; bag, baggage, serving wench and all. Now will you be off about your business before some spying rascal lays an information against me for harboring you?"
Richard joined me on the door-stone. The dawn was in its twilight now, and the great trees on the lawn were taking gray and ghostly shapes in the dim perspective.
"You heard what he had to say?" said he.
I nodded.
"It seems we have missed our cue on all sides," he went on, not without bitterness. "I would we might have had a chance to fire a shot or two before the ship went down."
"At Camden, you mean? That's but the beginning; the real battles are all to be fought yet, I should say."
He shook his head despondently. "You are a newcomer, Jack, and you know not how near outworn the country is. Gilbert Stair has the right of it when he says there will be nothing to stop the redcoats now."
I called to mind the resolute little handful under Captain Abram Forney, one of many such, he had told me, and would not yield the point.
"There will be plenty of fighting yet, and we must go to bear a hand where it is needed most," said I. "Where will that be, think you? At Charlotte?"
He looked at me reproachfully.
"This time 'tis you who are the laggard in love, John Ireton. Will you go and leave Mistress Margery wanting an answer to her poor little cry for help?"
I shrugged. "What would you? Has she not taken her affair into her own hands?"
"God knows how much or little she has had to say about it," said he. "But I mean to know, too, before I put my name on any company roll." We were among the trees by this, moving off for safety's sake, since the day was coming; and he broke off short to wheel and face me as one who would throttle a growling cur before it has a chance to bite. "We know the worst of each other now, Jack, and we must stand to our compact. Let us see her safe beyond peradventure of a doubt; then I'm with you to fight the redcoats single-handed, if you like. I know what you will say—that the country calls us now more than ever; but there must needs be some little rallying interval after all this disaster, and—"
"Have done, Richard," said I. "Set the pace and mayhap I can keep step with you. What do you propose?"
"This; that we go to Witherby Hall and get speech with Mistress Madge, if so be—"
"Stay a moment; who are these Witherbys?"
"A dyed-in-the-wool Tory family seated some ten miles across the line in York district. True, 'tis a rank Tory hotbed over there, and we shall run some risk."
"Never name risk to me if you love me, Richard Jennifer!" I broke in. "What is your plan?"
His answer was prompt and to the point. "To press on afoot through the forest till we come to the York settlement; then to borrow a pair of Tory horses and ride like gentlemen. Are you game for it?"
I hesitated. "I see no great risk in all this, and whatever the hazard, 'tis less for one than for two. You'd best go alone, Richard."
He saw my meaning; that I would stand aside and let him be her succor if she needed help. But he would not have it so.
"No," he said, doggedly. "We'll go together, and she shall choose between us for a champion, if she is in the humor to honor either of us. That is what 'twill come to in the end; and I warn you fairly, John Ireton, I shall neither give nor take advantage in this strife. I said last night that I would stand aside, but that I can not—not till she herself says the killing word with her own lips."
"And that word will be—?"
"That she loves another man. Come; let us be at it; we should be well out of this before the plantation people are astir."
Having a definite thing to do, we set about it forthwith, taking to the fields and making a wide circuit around the manor house and the quarters where the blacks were already stirring, to come out to the river and so to cross in our canoe.
The morning, soft and warm enough, threatened now to break the fair weather promise of the starlit night. Away in the east a heavy cloud bank curtained off the sunrise, and in the fields the few dry maize blades left by the partizan harriers were whispering to the gusts.
In the great forest all was yet dim and shadowy, and silent as the grave but for the whispering murmur of the rising wind in the higher tree-tops; a sound so like the babbling of brooks as most cunningly to deceive the ear and make it set the eye at work to look for water where there was none.
Not to take a certain hazard for the sake of better speed, we shunned the road, and for the first hour or so were not greatly hindered by keeping to the forest paths. In vast areas this virgin wood was free of undergrowth, open and park-like as a well-kept grove. Fireside tradition on the border tells how the Indians kept the forest clear by yearly burnings of the smaller growth; this for the better hunting of the deer. I vouch, not for the truth of this accounting for the fact, but for the fact itself. For endless miles between the watercourses these park-like stretches covered hill and dale; a vast mysterious temple of God's own building, its naves and choirs and transepts columned by the countless trees, with all their leafy crowns to interlace and form the groined arches overhead.
Through these pillared aisles we tramped abreast, shunning the road, as I have said, yet holding it parallel with our course where its direction served. In the open vistas we had frequent glimpses of it, winding, at feud with all the points of the compass, among the trees. But farther on we came into the lower land of a creek bottom, and here a thickset undergrowth robbed us of any view and made the march a toilsome struggle with the bushes.
It was in the densest of this underwood, when we could hear the purring of the stream ahead, that Jennifer stopped suddenly and began to sniff the air.
"Smoke," he said, briefly, in answer to my query. "A camp-fire, with meat abroil. Never tell me you can't smell it."
I said I could not—did not, at all events.
"Then you are not as sharp set for breakfast as I am. Call up your woodcraft and we'll stalk it." And, suiting the action to the word, he dropped noiselessly on hands and knees to inch his way cautiously out of the thicket.
I followed at his heels, marveling at his skill in threading the maze with never a snapped twig to betray him. For though I have called him a youthling, he came of great, square-shouldered English stock, and was well upon fourteen stone for weight. Yet upon occasion, as now, he could be as lithe and cat-like as an Indian, stealthy in approach and tiger-strong to spring.
In due time our creeping progress brought us out of the thicket on the brink of the higher creek bank. Just here the stream ran in a shallow ravine with shelving banks of clay, and on its hither margin was a bit of grassy intervale big enough for a horse to roll upon. Though it was sadly out of season, the carcass of a deer, fresh killed, hung upon a branch of the nearest tree, with a rifle leaning against the trunk as if to guard it. In the middle of the bit of sward a tiny camp-fire burned; and at the fire, squatting with their backs to us and each toasting a cut of the deer's meat on a forked stick, were two men.
One of these men would pass by courtesy as a white. His hunting-shirt and leggings were of deer skin, well grimed and greasy, with leather fringes at the seams of leg and sleeve. For all the summer heat, he wore a cap fashioned of raccoon-skin with the fur on; and for this great cap his iron-gray hair, matted and unkempt, served as a fringe to keep the other tasselings in countenance. The hunting-shirt was belted at the waist, and in the belt was thrust a sheathless knife huge enough to serve a butcher's purpose. From two leather thongs crossed upon his shoulders hung the powder-horn and bullet-pouch; and these, with the knife and rifle, summed up his accoutrements.
The other was a red man, and his attire was simpler. Like all our southern Indians, he went naked to the waist; but the savage's love of ornament showed forth in the fringe of colored porcupine quills on his leggings and in his raven hair bestuck with feathers. For arms he had an arsenal in his belt; two great pistols, a tomahawk, and the scalping-knife, this last smaller than the white man's carving tool, but far more vicious looking.
For a moment or two we crouched irresolute on the brink of the ravine, neither of us recognizing the two below. Then my young rashling must needs let out a yell.
"Now, by all that's lucky!" he cried, and would have leaped to his feet. But at the instant the earth-edge gave way under him, and he was sent tumbling with the small landslide of clay down upon the twain at the fire.
It went within a trembling hair's-breadth of a tragedy. The two at the fire sprang up as one man; and the bound that set the hunter afoot brought his long rifle to his shoulder. But that the Indian was the quicker, Richard's life would have paid the penalty of his slip, I think. At the trigger-pulling instant the Catawba thrust the thick of his hand between stone and steel, and the flint bit, harmless for Jennifer, into the palm of the Indian.
"Wah!" he ejaculated, in his soft guttural. "No want kill Captain Jennif', hey?"
Ephraim Yeates lowered his weapon and released the pinched hand held fast by the gun-flint.
"Well, I'm daddled, fair and square, Cap'n Dick!" he declared. "Jest one more shake of a dead lamb's tail, and I'd 'a' had ye on my mind, sartain sure! I allowed ye knowed better than to come whammling down that-away behint a man whilst he's a-cooking his ven'son."
Dick laughed and called to me to follow as I could. And his answer to the old borderer was no answer at all.
"'Tis to be hoped you and the chief don't mean to be niddering with that deer's meat. We were guessing but a half-hour back, Captain Ireton and I, whether or no we'd have to take up belt-slack for our breakfast."
At the word the Catawba whipped out his knife and fell to work hospitably on the meat supply. Meanwhile I came upon the scene, something less hurriedly than Richard. Ephraim Yeates looked me up and down with a sniff for my foreign-cut coat, another for my queue, and a third for the German ritter-boots I wore.
"Umph!" said he. "Now if here ain't that there dad-blame' Turkey-fighter again! What almighty cur'is things the good Lord do let loose on a stiff-necked and rebellious gineration!" Then to me, most pointedly: "Say, Cap'n; the big woods ain't no fitting place for such as you, ez I allow. Ye mought be getting them purty boots o' your'n all tore up on the briars."
He ended with a dry little laugh not unlike Mr. Gilbert Stair's parchment crackle; and, being his guest for the nonce, I laughed with him.
"Have your joke and welcome, Mr. Yeates," said I. "I am too near famished to quarrel with my chance of breakfast."
Much to my astoundment he flung his raccoon-skin cap into the air, spat upon his hands and began that insane war-dance of his.
"Whoop!" he yelled. "No band-box dandy from the settlemints ever sot out to call me 'Mister' and got away alive to brag on't! Ketch hold, you infergotten, Turkey-fighting, silver-buttoned jack-a-dandy till I dip ye in the creek and soak a flour-ration 'r two out 'n that there pig-tail top-knot o' your'n!Yip-pee!"
By this Jennifer was trying, as well as a man bent double with laughter might, to interpose in the interest of peace and amity; and even the stoical Catawba was all a-grin. So, seeing I was like to lose countenance with all of them, I watched my chance, and closing with my capering ancient, gave him a hearty wrestler's hug.
For all he was so gaunt and thin, and full twenty years or more my senior, he was a pretty handful. 'Twas much like trying to catch a fall out of some piece of steel-wired mechanism. None the less, after some wild stampings and strivings in which the old man all but made good his promise to put me in the creek, I took him unawares with a Cornishman's trick—a cross-buttock shifted suddenly to a shoulder-lift—which sent him flying overhead to land all abroad in the soft clay of the landslide.
The effect of this little triumph was magical and wholly unlooked for. When he had gathered himself and set his limbs in order, Ephraim Yeates sat up and thrust out a claw-like hand.
"Put it there, stranger," he said. "I reckon ez how that settles it. Old Eph Yeates'll share fair, powder and lead, parched cornandpan-meat with the man that can flop him that-away. Whilst ye're a-needing a friend in the big woods—a raw-meat-eating Injun-skinner that can jest or'narily whop his weight in wildcats—why, old Eph's your man; from now on,ifnot sooner." And in this wise began an alliance the like of which, for true-blue loyalty on this old borderer's part, these colder-hearted times of yours, my dears, will never see.
As you would guess, I gripped the hand of pledging most heartily, pulling the old man to his feet and protesting it was but a trick he would never let another play on him. And then we four fell upon the deer's meat which was by this time—not cooked, to be sure, but seared a little on the outside in true hunter fashion.
While we ate, Richard spoke freely of our intendings; and in return Ephraim Yeates was able to confirm Mr. Gilbert Stair's war news to the letter. For all his Tory bias and prejudice, it seemed that Margery's father had spoken by the book. Gates' army was crushed and scattered to the four winds; Thomas Sumter's free-lances had been attacked, worsted and driven, with the leader himself so sorely wounded that he was carried from the field in a blanket slung between the horses of two of his men; and, as was to be expected, the Tories were up and arming in all the north country. Truly, the prospect was most gloomy and the outlook for the patriot cause was to the full as desperate as King George himself could wish.
"But you, Ephraim, and the chief, here; are you two running away like all the others?" Richard would ask.
The old hunter growled his denial between the mouthfuls of scarce-warmed meat. "I reckon ez how 'tis t'other way 'round; we're sort o' camping on the redcoats' trail, ez I allow. Ain't we, Chief, hey?"
The Catawba's assent was a guttural "Wah!" and Ephraim Yeates went on to explain.
"Ye see, 'tis this-away. You took a laugh out'n me, Cap'n Dick, for spying 'round on that there Britisher hoss-captain and his redskins; but 'long to'ards the last I met up with a thing 'r two wo'th knowing. 'Twas a powder and lead cargo they was a-waiting for; and they're allowing to sneak it through the mountings to the overhill Cherokees."
"Well?" says Dick.
The old man cut another slice of the venison and took his time to impale it on the forked toasting stick.
"Well, then I says to the chief, here, says I, 'Chief, this here's our A-number-one chance to spile the 'Gyptians; get heap gun, heap powder, heap lead, heap scalp.' The chief, he says, 'Wah!'—which is good Injun-talk for anything ye like,—and so here we are, hot-foot on the trail o' that there hoss-captain and his powder varmints."
"Alone?" said I, in sheer amazement at the brazen effrontery of this chase of half a hundred well-armed men by two.
The old hunter chuckled his dry little laugh. "We ain't sich tarnation big fools ez we look, Cap'n John. There's a good plenty of 'em to wallop us, ez I'll allow, if it come to fighting 'em fair and square. But there'll be some dark night 'r other whenst we can slip up on 'em and raise a scalp 'r two and lift what plunder we can tote; hey, Chief?"
But now Richard would inquire what time in the night the powder convoy left Appleby Hundred, and if Gilbert Stair's York District guests had traveled with it. To these askings Yeates made answer that Falconnet and his troop, with the Cherokee contingent, had taken the road at midnight, or thereabouts; and that the Witherbys, with Mistress Margery riding her own black mare, and her maid on a pillion behind a negro groom, had passed some two hours later.
This was as we had hoped it might be; but when Dick's satisfaction would have set itself in words, the old hunter made a sudden sign for silence and quickly flung himself full length to lay his ear to the ground. Whereat we all began likewise to listen, but I, for one, heard nothing till Yeates said: "A hoss; a-taking the back track like old Jehu the son of Nimshi was a-giving him the whip and spur," and then we all marked the distant drumming of hoofbeats.
The old borderer sprang afoot, kicked the fire into the stream, and caught up his rifle. "Let's be a-moving," he said. "We must make out to stop that there hoss-galloper at the ford and find out what-all he's a rip-snorting that-away for."
The road crossing of the stream was but a little way above our breakfast camp; and we were out of the thicket in time to see the horseman, a negro clinging with locked arms to the neck of his mount, come tearing down to the ford. At sight of us, or else because he would not take the water at full speed, the horse reared, pawed the air, and fell clumsily, carrying his skilless rider with him.
We picked the black up and soused him in the stream till he found his tongue; and the first wagging of that useful member gave us news to fire the blood in our veins—in Jennifer's and mine, at any rate.
"Yah!" he screamed, choking out the muddy creek water that had well-nigh strangled him. "Yah! red debbil Injins kill ebberybody and tote off Mistis Marg'y and dat Jeanne 'ooman! Dat's what dey done!"