At first we sought in vain for the storing-place of the powder. It was the sharp eyes of the Catawba that finally descried it. A rude housing of pine boughs, like the huts of the troopers, had been built at the base of a great boulder on the opposite bank of the stream; and here was the lading of the powder train.

From what could be seen 'twas clear that the camp was no mere bivouac for the day; indeed, the Englishmen were still working upon their pine-bough shelters, building themselves in as if for a stay indefinite.

"'Tis a rest camp," quoth Dick; "though why they should break the march here is more than I can guess."

"No," said Ephraim Yeates. "'Tain't jest rightly a rest camp, ez I take it. Ez I was a-saying last night, this here is Tuckasege country, and we ain't no furder than a day's running from the Cowee Towns. Now the Tuckaseges and the over-mounting Cherokees ain't always on the best o' tarms, and I was a wondering if the hoss-captain hadn't sot down here to wait whilst he could send a peace-offer' o' powder and lead on to the Cowee chiefs to sort o' smooth the way."

"No send him yet; going to send," was Uncanoola's amendment. "Look-see, Chelakee braves make haste for load horses down yonder now!"

Again the sharp eyes of the Catawba had come in play. At the foot of the great boulder some half dozen of the Cherokees were busy with the powder cargo, lashing pack-loads of it upon two horses. One of the group, who appeared to be directing the labor of the others, stood apart, holding the bridle reins of three other horses caparisoned as for a journey. When the loading was accomplished to the satisfaction of the horse-holding chieftain, he and two others mounted, took the burdened animals in tow, and the small cavalcade filed off down the stream toward the apparent cul de sac at the lower end of the valley.

Ephraim Yeates was up in a twinkling, dragging us back from the cliff edge.

"Up with ye!" he cried. "Now's our chance to kill two pa'tridges with one stone! If we can make out to get down into t'other valley in time to see how them varmints come out, we'll know the way in. More'n that, we can ambush 'em and so make sartain sure o' five o' the six hosses we're a-going to need, come night. But we've got to leg for it like Ahimaaz the son of Zadok!"

Thus the old borderer; and being only too eager to come to handgrips with the enemy, we were up and running faster than ever Joab's messenger ran, long before the old man finished with his Scriptural simile.

Not to take the risk of delay on any unexplored short cut, we made straight for the ravine of our ascent, found it as by unerring instinct, and were presently racing down to the Indian trace in the little upland valley above the gorge.

For all the helter-skelter haste I found time to remember that the gorge as we had last seen it had been well besprinkled with armed Cherokees lying in wait for us. If they were still there we should be like to have a hot welcome; and some reminder of this I gasped out to Yeates in mid flight.

"Ne'm mind that; if we run up ag'inst 'em anywhere, 'twon't be there-away. They've took the hint and quit; scattered out to hunt us long ago," was his answer, jerked out between bounds. And after that I loosed the Ferara in its sheath and saved my breath as I might for the killing business of the moment.

'Twas a sharp disappointment that, for all the haste of our mad scramble down the mountain, we were too late to surprise the secret of the enemy's stronghold. The Catawba was leading when we dashed down into the valley, and one glance sent him flying back to stop us short with a dumb show purporting that the quarry was already out of the defile and coming up the Indian path.

Richard swore grievously, but the old backwoodsman took the checkmate placidly and began to set the pieces for the second game in which the horses were the stake, hiding his useless rifle in a hollow tree,—his powder had been soaked and spoiled in the early morning plunge for life,—and drawing his hunting-knife to feel its edge and point.

"Ez I allow, that fotches us to the hoss-lifting," he said, in his slow drawl. Then he laid his commands upon us. "Ord'ly, and in sojer-fashion, now; no whooping and yelling. If the hoss-captain's got scouts out a-s'arching for us, one good screech from these here varmints we're a-going to put out'n their mis'ry 'u'd fix our flints for kingdom come. I ain't none afeard o' your nerve,"—this to Richard and me—"leastwise, not when it comes to fair and square sojer-fighting. But this here onfall has got to be like the smiting o' the 'Malekites—root and branch; and if ye're tempted to be anywise marciful, jest ricollect that for the sake o' them wimmen-folks we've got to have these hosses!"

You are not to suppose that he was holding us inactive while he thus exhorted us. On the contrary, he was posting us skilfully beside the trace like the shrewd old Indian fighter that he was, with a rare and practised eye to the maximum of cover with the minimum of thicket tangle to impede the rush or to shorten the sword-swing.

But when all was done we were at this disadvantage; that since the enemy was close at hand we dared not cross the path to give our trap a jaw on either side. To offset this, the Catawba dropped out of line and disappeared; and when the Cherokees were no more than a hundred yards away, Uncanoola came in sight a like distance in the opposite direction, running easily down the path to meet the up-coming riders.

Richard let slip an admiration-oath under his breath. "There's a fine bit of strategy for you!" he whispered. "That wily Jack-at-a-pinch of ours will befool them into believing that he is a runner from the Cowee Towns. 'Tis our cue to lie close; he will halt them just here, and there will be roving eyes in the heads of the two who have not to talk."

We had not long to wait. Our cunning ally timed his halting of the emissaries to a nicety, and when the three Cherokees drew rein they were within easy blade's reach. The powwow, lengthened by Uncanoola till we were near bursting with impatience, was spun out wordily, and presently we saw the pointing of it. The Catawba was affecting to doubt the protests of the emissaries and would have them dismount and prove their good faith by smoking the peace-pipe with him.

I give you fair warning, my dears, that you may turn the page here and skip what follows if you are fain to be tender-hearted on the score of these savage enemies of ours. It was in the very summer solstice of the year of violence; a time when he who took the sword was like to perish with the sword; and we thought of little save that Margery and her handmaiden were in deadliest peril, and that these Indians had five horses which we must have.

And as for my own part in the fray, when I recognized in the five-feathered chieftain of the three that copper-hued imp of Satan who had been the merciless master of ceremonies at the torturing of my poor black Tomas, the decent meed of mercy which even a seasoned soldier may cherish died within me, and I made sure the steel would find its mark.

So, when Uncanoola drew forth his tobacco pipe and made the three doomed ones sit with him in the path to smoke the peace-whiff all around, we picked out each his man and smote to slay. The scythe-like sweep of Jennifer's mighty claymore left the five-feathered chieftain the shorter by a head in the same pulse-beat that the Ferara scanted a second of the breath to yell with; though now I recall it, the gurgling death-cry of the poor wretch with the steel in his throat was more terrible to hear than any war-whoop. As for the old borderer, he was more deliberate. Being fair behind and within arm's reach of his man, he seized him by the scalp-lock, bent the head backward across his knee—but, faugh! these are the merest butcher details, and I would spare you—and myself, as well.

While yet this most merciless deed was a-doing, the Catawba bounded to his feet and made sure of the horses which were rearing and snorting with affright. That done, he must needs gloat, Indian-wise, over his fallen adversary, turning the headless body with his foot and gibing at it.

"Wah! Call hisself the Great Bear, hey? Heap lie; heap no bear; heap nothing, now. Papoose bear no let hisself be trap' that way. No smoke peace-pipe—"

But now Ephraim Yeates, standing ear a-cock and motionless, like some grim old statue done in leather, cut him short with a sudden, "Hist, will ye!" and a twinkling instant later we had other work to do.

"Onto the hosses with this here Injun-meat, ez quick ez the loving Lord'll let ye!" was the sharp command. "There's a whole clanjamfrey o' the varmints a-coming down the trace, and I reckon ez how we'd better scratch gravel immejitly, if not sooner!"



XXVI

WE TAKE THE CHARRED STICK FOR A GUIDE

Luckily for us the new danger was approaching from the westward. So, by dint of the maddest hurryings we got the bodies of the three Cherokees hoist upon the horses, and were able to efface in part the signs of the late encounter before the band of riders coming down the Indian path was upon us. But there was no time to make an orderly retreat. At most we could only withdraw a little way into the wood, halting when we were well in cover, and hastily stripping coats and waistcoats to muffle the heads of the horses.

So you are to conceive us waiting with nerves upstrung, ready for fight or flight as the event should decide, stifling in such pent-up suspense as any or all of us would gladly have exchanged for the fiercest battle. Happily, the breath-scanting interval was short. From behind our thicket screen we presently saw a file of Indian horsemen riding at a leisurely footpace down the path. Ephraim Yeates quickly named these new-comers for us.

"'Tis about ez I allowed—some o' the Tuckaseges a-scouting down to hold a powwow with the hoss-captain. Now, then; if them sharp-nosed ponies o' their'n don't happen to sniff the blood—"

The hope was dashed on the instant by the sudden snorting and shying of two or three of the horses in passing, and we laid hold of our weapons, keying ourselves to the fighting pitch. But, curiously enough, the riders made no move to pry into the cause. So far from it, they flogged the shying ponies into line and rode on stolidly; and thus in a little time that danger was overpast and the evening silence of the mighty forest was ours to keep or break as we chose.

The old frontiersman was the first to speak.

"Well, friends, I reckon ez how we mought ez well thank the good Lord for all His marcies afore we go any furder," he would say; and he doffed his cap and did it forthwith.

It was as grim a picture as any limner of the weird could wish to look upon. The twilight shadows were empurpling the mountains and gathering in dusky pools here and there where the trees stood thickest in the valley. The hush of nature's mystic hour was abroad, and even the swiftly flowing river, rushing sullenly along its rocky bed no more than a stone's cast beyond the Indian path, seemed to pretermit its low thunderings. There was never a breath of air astir in all the wood, and the leaves of the silver poplar that will twinkle and ripple in the lightest zephyr hung stark and motionless.

Barring the old borderer, who had gone upon his knees, we stood as we were; the Catawba holding the pack horses, and Jennifer and I the three that bore the ghastly burdens of mortality. The bodies of the slain had been flung across the saddles to balance as they might; and to the pommel of that saddle which bore the trunk of the five-feathered chieftain, Uncanoola had knotted the grisly head by its scalp-lock to dangle and roll about with every restless movement of the horse—a hideous death-mask that seemed to mop and mow and stare fearsomely at us with its wide-open glassy eyes.

With this background fit for the staging of a scene in Dante Alighieri's tragic comedy, the looming mountains, the upper air graying on to dusk, and the solemn forest aisles full of lurking shadows, you are to picture the old frontiersman, bareheaded and on his knees, pouring forth his soul in all the sonorous phrase of Holy Writ, now in thanksgiving, and now in most terrible beseechings that all the vials of Heaven's wrath might be poured out upon our enemies.

His face, commonly a leather mask to hide the man behind it, was now ablaze with the fire of zealotry; and, truly, in these his spasm-fits of supplication he stood for all that is most awe-inspiring and unnerving, asking but a little stretch of the imagination to figure him as one of those old iron-hard prophets of denunciation come back to earth to be the herald of the wrath of God.

'Twas close upon actual nightfall when the old man rose from his knees and, with the rising, put off the beadsman and put on the shrewd old Indian fighter. Followed some hurried counselings as to how we should proceed, and in these the hunter set the pace for us as his age and vast experience in woodcraft gave him leave.

His plan had all the merit of simplicity. Now that we had the horses, Richard's notion of an approach from the head of the sunken valley became at once the most hopeful of any. So Ephraim Yeates proposed that we betake ourselves to the mountain top and to the head of that ravine which the Catawba and I had discovered. Here we should leave the horses well hidden and secured, make our way down the ravine, and, with the stream for a guide, follow the sunken valley to the camp at its lower end. Once on the ground without having given the alarm, we might hope to free the captives under cover of the darkness; and our retreat up the valley would be far less hazardous than any open flight by way of the unexplored road the powder train had used.

So said the old backwoodsman; but neither Dick nor I would agree to this in toto. Dick argued that while we were killing time in the roundabout advance we should be leaving Margery wholly at the mercy of the baronet, and that every hour of delay was full of hideous menace to her. Hence he proposed that three of us should carry out the hunter's plan, leaving the fourth to take the hint given by the charred stick and the swimming ambush crew, and so penetrating to the valley by the stream cavern, be at hand to strike a blow for our dear lady's honor in case of need.

"'Tis a thing to be done, and I am with you, Dick," said I. This before Ephraim Yeates could object. "Should there be need for any, two blades will be better than one. If it come to blows and we are killed or taken, Yeates and the chief must make the shift to do without our help."

As you would guess, the old hunter demurred to this halving of our slender force, but we over-persuaded him. If all went well, we were to rendezvous on the scene of action to carry out the plan of rescue. But if our adventure should prove disastrous, Yeates and Uncanoola were to bide their time, striking in when and how they might.

Touching this contingency, I drew the old man aside for a word in private.

"If aught befall us, Ephraim,—if we should be nabbed as we are like to be,—you are not to let any hope of helping us lessen by a feather's weight the rescue chance of the women. You'll promise me this?"

"Sartain sure; ye can rest easy on that, Cap'n John. But don't ye go for to let that rampaging boy of our'n upsot the fat in the fire with any o' his foolishness. He's love-sick, he is; and there ain't nothing in this world so ridic'lous foolish ez a love-sick boy—less'n 'tis a love-sick gal."

I promised on my part and so we went our separate ways in the gathering darkness; though not until the lashings of the packs had been cut and the powder and lead, save such spoil of both as Ephraim Yeates and Uncanoola would reserve, had been spilled into the river. As for the bodies of the dead Indians, the old hunter said he would let them ride till he should come to some convenient chasm for a sepulcher; but I mistrusted that he and the Catawba would scalp and leave them once we were safely out of sight.

At the parting we took the river's edge for it, Richard and I, keeping well under the bank and working our way cautiously down the gorge until we were stopped by the pouring cross-torrent of the underground tributary. Here we turned short to the left along the margin of the barrier stream, and tracing its course across the gorge came presently to the northern cliff at the lip of the spewing cavern mouth.

By now the night was fully come and in the wooded defile we could place ourselves only by the sense of touch.

"Are you ready, Dick?" said I.

"As ready as a man with a shaking ague can be," he gritted out. "This dog's work we have been doing of late has brought my old curse upon me and I am like to rattle my teeth loose."

"Let me go alone then. Another cold plunge may be the death of you."

"No," said he, stubbornly. "Wait but a minute and the fever will be on me; then I shall be fighting-fit for anything that comes."

So we waited, and I could hear his teeth clicking like castanets. Having had a tertian fever more than once in the Turkish campaigning, I had a fellow-feeling for the poor lad, knowing well how the thought of a plunge into cold water would make him shrink.

In a little time he felt for my hand and grasped it.

"I'm warm enough now, in all conscience," he said; and with that we slipped into the stream.

'Twas a disappointment of the grateful sort to find the water no more than mid-thigh deep. The current was swift and strong, but with the pebbly bottom to give good footing 'twas possible to stem it slowly. Laying hold of each other for the better breasting of the flood we felt our way warily to the middle of the pool; felt for the low-sprung cavern arch, and for that scanty lifting of it where we hoped to find head room between stone above and stream below.

We found the highest part of the arch after some blind groping, and making lowly obeisance to the gods of the underworld began a snail-like progress into the gurgling throat of the spewing rock-monster.

I here confess to you, my dears, that, had I loved my sweet lady less, no earthly power could have driven me into that dismal stifling place. All my life long I have had a most unspeakable horror of low-roofed caverns and squeezing passages that cramp a man for breath and for the room to draw it in; and when the suffocating madness came upon me, as it did when we were well jammed in this cursed horror-hole, I was right glad to have my love for Margery to make an outward-seeming man of me; glad, too, that my dear lad was close behind to shame me into going on.

Yet, after all, the passage through the throat of the rock dragon was vastly more terrifying than difficult. Once well within the closely drawn upper lip we could brace our backs against the roof and so have a purchase for the foothold. Better still, when we had passed a pike's-length beyond the lip the breathing space above the water grew wider and higher till at length we could stand erect and come abreast to lock arms and push on side by side.

From that the stream broadened and grew shallower with every step, and presently we could hear it on ahead babbling over the stones like any peaceful woodland brook. Then suddenly the dank and noisome air of the cavern gave place to the pine-scented breath of the forest; and, looking straight up, we could see the twinkling stars shining down upon us from a narrow breadth of sky.



XXVII

HOW A KING'S TROOPER BECAME A WASTREL

Dick pressed closer to me, and I could feel him drinking in deep drafts of the grateful outer air.

"What new wonder is this?" he would ask, with something akin to awe in his voice; but we must needs grope this way and that to feel out the answer with our finger-tips.

When the answer was found, the mystery of the lost trail was solved most simply. As we made out, we were in a deep crevice cut crosswise by the stream which, issuing from a yawning cavern in the farther wall, was quickly engulfed again by that lower archway we had just traversed. In some upheaval of the earthquake age a huge slice of the mountain's face had split off and settled away from the parent cliff to leave a deep cleft open to the sky. One end of this crevice chasm—that toward the upland valley—was choked and filled by the debris of later landslides; but the lower end was open.

Through this lower end, as we made no doubt, the powder train had come, turning from the Indian path in the gorge up the bed of the barrier stream, turning again at the outer cavern mouth to squeeze in single file between the thickly matted undergrowth and the cliff's face, and so to pass around the split-off mass and come into the crevice rift.

How the sharp eyes of the old hunter, and those of the Catawba as well, had missed the finding of this squeezing place where the cavalcade had left the stream-bed, we could never guess; but on the chance that we might yet need to know all the crooks and turnings of this outlet, we felt our way quite around the masking cliff and down to the stream's edge in the gorge.

That done we were ready for a farther advance, and clambering back into the crevice we once more took the stream for our guide and were presently deep in the natural tunnel piercing the mountain proper. This extension of the subterranean waterway proved to be a noble cavern, wide and high enough to pass a loaded wain, as we determined by tossing pebbles against the arching roof. None the less, 'twas full of crooks and windings; and in the sharpest elbow of them all, where we were like to lose our way by blundering into one of the many branching side passages, Richard stopped me with a hand thrust back.

"Softly!" he cautioned; "here are their vedettes!"

Just beyond the crooking elbow the dull red glow from a tiny fire gone to coals showed us two Indian sentries set to keep the pass. Dick drew his claymore, but he was chilling again and the hand that grasped the great blade was shaking as with a palsy. Yet he would mutter, as the teeth-chattering suffered him:

"What say you, Jack? Shall we rush them? There's naught else for it." And then, with a gritting oath: "Oh, damn this cursed chilling!"

I whispered back that we would wait till he was better fit. He was loath to admit the necessity, but, as it chanced, the momentary delay saved our lives in that strait. While we paused, hugging the shadows in the crooking elbow, the gloomy depths beyond the sentries were suddenly starred with flaring flambeaux lighting the way for a hasting rabble of savages; and had we been entangled in the struggle with the two sentinels we should have been taken red-handed.

As it was, we had to make the quickest play to save ourselves. In the same breath we both remembered the narrow side passage just behind in which we were nigh to losing our way, and into this we plunged, reckless of possible pitfalls. We were no more than safely out of the main corridor when the runners, some score of them, as we guessed, trooped past our covert in full cry, leaving us half smothered in the smoky trail of their pitch-pine flambeaux.

"Now what a-devil has set this hornet's nest of theirs abuzz so suddenly?" I whispered, when the smoke-choke gave us liberty to speak without coughing to betray ourselves.

"Our pony-riding Tuckaseges, doubtless," was Richard's ready answer. "By all the chances, they should have met the Great Bear and his peace-offering out yonder on the trace—which same they did not. So when they bring this tale to camp there is the devil to pay and no pitch hot. God help our tough old Ephraim and the Catawba if these bloodhounds win out in time to overtake them!"

"Aye," said I; and then we crept out of our dodge-hole and made ready to go about our business with the sentries.

But when we came to peer again around the crooking elbow it would seem that the hurrying search party had fought our battle for us. The watch-fire was there to light a little circle in the gloom, but the watchers were gone. We chanced a guess that they had joined the hue and cry, and so we pressed forward, past the handful of embers and into the pit-black depths beyond.

Twenty paces farther on it came to playing blind man's buff with the rocky walls again, and measured by the trippings and stumblings 'twas a long Sabbath day's journey to that final turn in the great earth-burrow whence we could see the glimmering of the enemy's camp-fires in the sunken valley.

"Now God be praised!" quoth Richard most fervently. "Another hour in this cursed kennel with the fever on me and I should be a yammering loose-wit." And I, too, was glad enough to see the stars again, and to be at large beneath them.

Emerging from the subterranean way, we held to the camp side of the stream, making an ample circuit to the left to come down upon the enemy's position from the wooded slope behind the encampment. We met no let or hindrance in this approach. Secure in their stronghold, the Indians had no patrols out; and as for the Englishmen, every mother's son of them, it seemed, was basking in the light of a great fire built before the pine-bough shelters.

Favored by a dense thicketing of laurel we made a near-hand reconnaissance of the little wigwam which held our dear lady. As I have said, this was pitched in the thinning of the forest which covered the steep slope behind the encampment, and so was the farthest removed from the stream, and from the Indian lodges disposed in a half-moon at the water's edge. Here all was quiet as the grave, and the clamor of the Indian camp came softened by the distance to a low monotonous humming like the buzzing of a bee-hive. The flap of the tepee-lodge was closely drawn, and the bit of fire before it had burned out to a heap of white-ashed embers.

"They are safe as yet, thank God!" says Richard, heaving a most palpable sigh of relief. Then, with the fever in his veins to whip his natural ardor into hasty action: "'Twill be hours before Eph and the Catawba can come in by your upper ravine, Jack, and we shall never have a better chance than this. Hold you quiet here, whilst I—"

But I laid fast hold of him and would not hear to any such a foolhardy marring of Ephraim Yeates's plan.

"Heavens, boy! are you gone clean mad?" I would say. "'Twill be risky enough with midnight in our favor; with the camp well asleep, and that great fire burned down to give us something less than broad daylight to work in!"

He turned upon me like a pettish child. "Oh, to the devil with your stumbling-blocks, John Ireton! You are always for holding back. By heaven! I'll swear you have no drop of lover's blood in your veins!"

"So you have said before. But let that pass, we must bide by our promise to Yeates, which was not to interfere unless Margery stood in present peril. Moreover, we should learn the lay of the land better while we have the firelight to help. When the time for action comes we must be able to make the play with our eyes shut, if need be. Come."

'Twas like pulling sound teeth to get him away, but he yielded at length and we crept on to have some better sight of the troop camp. We had it; had also a glimpse of the baronet-captain playing loo with his lieutenant and another. The tableau at the fire gave us better courage. The men had laid their arms aside and were sprawling at their ease; and while the arch scoundrel was in the gaming mood, Margery had less to fear from him.

I said as much to Dick, and for answer he pointed to the flask of usquebaugh which was at that moment making the round of the loo players.

"I know Frank Falconnet better than you do, Jack, for I have known him later. He is all kinds of a villain sober, but he is a fiend incarnate with the liquor in him. 'Tis lucky we are here. If he do but drink deep enough, Margery is like to have need—"

"Hist!" said I; "some of these lounging rascals may not be so drowsy as they look."

He nodded, and we backed away to make another circuit which fetched us out on the up-valley side of the encampment. Here we could look down into a smaller glade or bottom meadow on the stream where the horses of the band were cropping the lush grass. It was the sight of these, and of Margery's black mare among them, that set me thinking of a pickeering venture to the full as harebrained as that from which I had but now dissuaded Richard Jennifer.

"We shall need another mount, and Mistress Margery's saddle," I said. "Lie you close here whilst I play the horse-thief on these reavers."

But my dear lad was rash only for himself. "Now who is daft?" he retorted. "The Catawba himself could never run that gantlet and come through alive."

"Mayhap," I admitted. "But yet—"

He cut me off in the midst, winding an arm about my head by way of an extinguisher. One of the redcoat troopers lounging before the great fire had risen and was coming straight for our hiding place.

I saw not what to do; should have done nothing, I dare say, till the man had walked fair upon us. But Richard was quicker witted.

"Give me your sword!" he muttered; "mine will be too long to shorten upon," and when the Englishman's next stride would have kicked us out of hiding, Dick rose up before him like the devil in a play, gripped him by the collar and laid his sword's point at his throat.

"Follow me, step for step, or you are a dead man!" he commanded; and so, pacing backward, he led the fellow, with the hulking body of him for a shield and mask, out of the circle of firelight and into the safer shadows of the forest.

When I had made a creeping detour to join him, he still had his man by the collar and was emphasizing the need for silence by sundry prickings with the Ferara.

"Say, quick! what to do with him, Jack?" he demanded, when I came up; and now my slower wit came into play.

"Out of this to some safer dressing-room, and I'll show you," said I; and forthwith we marched our prize up the valley a long musket-shot or more.

When the soldier had leave to speak he begged right lustily for his life, as you would guess; but we gave him a short shrift. If the plan I had in mind should have a fighting chance for success it must be set in train before this trooper should be missed.

So, having first gagged the poor devil with his own neckerchief, we stripped him quickly; and I as quickly donned the borrowed uniform and became, at least in outward semblance, a light-horse trooper of that king whose service I had once forsworn. The items of small-clothes, waistcoat and head-gear fitted me passing well, but when it came to the boots we stuck fast, and I was forced to wear my own foot-coverings.

The change made,—and you may believe no play-house actor of them all ever doffed or donned a costume quicker,—we bound our luckless captive hand and foot, pinned him face downward in the sward, and so leaving him with only his boots for a memento,—happily for him the night was no more than goose-flesh cool,—we raced back to our peeping-place on the skirting of the camp ground.

Here Dick wrung my hand, calling himself all the knaves unspeakable for letting me take a risk which he was pleased to call his own; and with that I stepped out into the firelight and was fair afoot in the enemy's camp.



XXVIII

IN WHICH I SADDLE THE BLACK MARE

Having so good a disguise, the thing I had set myself to do would seem to ask for little more than peaceful boldness held in check by common caution.

The point where I had broken cover to step into the circle of fire light was nearly equidistant from the Englishmen's camp on the right and the horse meadow on the left, so I had not to pass within recognition range of the great fire; indeed, I might have skulked in the laurel cover all the way, thus coming to the horses unseen by any, but that I was afraid Falconnet might miss his trooper. So I thought it best to show myself discreetly.

Copying our captive's lounging stride, I first held a sauntering course down to the stream's edge, keeping the great camp-fire and the droning Indian hive well to the right and far enough aloof to baffle any over-curious eye at either. Coming to the stream without mishap, I stopped and made a feint of drinking; after which I crossed and climbed slowly toward the makeshift powder magazine.

As I have said, the camp was pitched in a small savanna or natural clearing on the right bank of the little river. This clearing was hedged about by the forest on three sides, and backed by the densely wooded steeps and crags of the western cliff. I guessed the compass of it to be something more than an acre; not greatly more, since the fire at the troop camp lighted all its boundaries.

On the left or opposite bank of the stream there was no intervale at all. The ground rose sharply from the water's edge in a rough hillside thickly studded and bestrewn with boulders great and small; fallen cleavings and hewings from the crags of the eastern cliff. 'Twas at the foot of one of the boulders, a huge overhanging mass of weather-riven rock facing the camp, that the powder cargo was sheltered; so isolated to be out of danger from the camp-fires.

From the hillside just below this powder rock I could look back upon the camp en enfilade, as an artilleryman would say. Nearest at hand was the half-moon of Indian lodges with the hollow of the crescent facing the stream, and a caldron fire burning in the midst. Around the fire a ring of warriors naked to the breech-clout kept time in a slow shuffling dance to a monotonous chanting; and for onlookers there was an outer ring of squatting figures—the visiting Tuckaseges, as I supposed.

Beyond the Indian lodges, and a little higher up the gentle slope of the savanna, were the troop shelters; and beyond these, half concealed in the fringing of the boundary forest, was the tepee-lodge of the women.

On the bare hillside beneath the powder magazine I made no doubt I was in plainest view from the great fire, and the proof of this conclusion came shortly in a bellowing hail from Falconnet.

"Ho, Jack Warden!" he called, making a speaking-trumpet of his hands to lift the hail above the chanting of the Indian dancers. "Have a look at that shelter whilst you are over there and make sure 'twill shed rain if the weather shifts."

Now some such long-range marking down as this was what I had been angling for. So I came to attention and saluted in soldierly fashion, thereby raising a great laugh among my pseudo-comrades around the trooper fire—a laugh that pointed shrewdly to the baronet-captain's lack of proper discipline. But that is neither here nor there. Having my master's order for it, I climbed to the foot of the powder rock.

Here the bare sight of all the stored-up devastation set me athirst with a fierce longing for leave to snap a pistol in the well-laid mine. For if these enemies of ours had planned their own undoing they could never have given a desperate foeman a better chance. To hold the pine boughs of the rude shelter in place they had piled a great loose wall of stones around and over the cargo; and the firing of the powder, heaped as it was against the backing cliff of the boulder, would hurl these weighting stones in a murderous broadside upon the camp across the stream.

But since my dear lady would also share the hazard of such a broadside, I had no leave to blow myself and the powder convoy to kingdom come, as I thirsted to—could not, you will say, having neither pistol to snap nor flint and steel to fire a train. Nay, nay, my dears, I would not have you think so lightly of my invention. Had this been the only obstacle, you may be sure I should have found a way to grind a firing spark out of two bits of stone.

But being otherwise enjoined, as I say, I turned my back upon the temptation and held to the business in hand, which was to reach and recross the stream higher up and so to come among the horses.

As I had hoped to find them, the saddles were hung upon the branches of the nearest trees, Margery's horse-furnishings among them. At first the black mare was shy of me, but a gentling word or two won her over, and she let me take her by the forelock and lead her deeper into the herd where I could saddle and bridle her in greater safety.

My plan to cut her out was simple enough. Trusting to the darkness—the horse meadow was far enough from the fires to make a murky twilight of the ruddy glow—I thought to lead the mare quietly away up the stream and thus on to the foot of that ravine by which we hoped to climb to the old borderer's rendezvous on the plateau. But when all was ready and I sought to set this plan in action, an unforeseen obstacle barred the way. To keep the horses from straying up the valley an Indian sentry line was strung above the grazing meadow, and into this I blundered like any unlicked knave of a raw recruit.

Had I been armed, the warrior who rose before me phantom-like in the laurel edging of the meadow would have had a most sharp-pointed answer to his challenge. As it was,—I had left my sword with Jennifer because the captured trooper whose understudy I was had left his sword in camp,—I tried to parley with the sentry. He knew no word of English, nor I of Cherokee; but that deadlock was speedily broken. A guttural call summoned others of the horse-keepers, and among them one who spoke a little English.

"Ugh! What for take white squaw horse?" he demanded.

"'Tis the captain's order," I replied, lying boldly to fit the crisis.

At that they gave me room; and had I hastened, I had doubtless gone at large without more ado. But at this very apex point of hazard I must needs play out the part of unalarm to the fool's envoi, taking time to part the mare's forelock under the head-stall, and looking leisurely to the lacings of the saddle-girth.

This foolhardy delay cost me all, and more than all. I was still fiddle-faddling with the girth strap, the better to impose upon my Indian horse-guards, when suddenly there arose a yelling hubbub of laughter in the camp behind. I turned to look and beheld a thing laughable enough, no doubt, and yet it broke no bubble of mirth in me. Half-way from the nearest forest fringe to the great fire a man, white of skin, and clothed only in a pair of trooper boots, was running swiftly for cover to the nearest pine-bough shelter, shouting like an escaped Bedlamite as he fled. It asked for no second glance, this apparition of the yelling madman; 'twas our captive soldier, foot-loose and racing in to raise the hue and cry.

Now you may always count upon this failing in a cautious man, that at a crisis he is like to do the unwisest thing that offers. This cutting out of Margery's mare was none so vital a matter that I should have risked the marring of Ephraim Yeates's plan upon it. Yet having done this very thing, I must needs make a bad matter infinitely worse.

Instead of mounting to ride a charge through the camp, and so to draw the pursuit after me toward the cavern entrance, as I should, I slapped the mare to send her bounding through the guard line, snatched a saddle from its oak-branch peg to hurl it in the faces of the sentry group, and darting aside, plunged into the laurel thicket to come by running where I could and creeping where I must to that place where I had left Richard Jennifer.

All hot and exasperated as I was, 'twas something less than cooling to find Dick a-double on the ground, holding his sides and laughing like a yokel at his first pantomime.

"Oh, ho, ho! did you—did you twig him, Jack?" he gasped. "Saw you ever such a mincing puss-in-boots since the Lord made you? Ah! ha! ha!"

"The devil take your ill-timed humor!" I cried. "Up with you, man, and let us vanish while we may!"

By this the camp was in a pretty ferment, as you would guess—our late captive having had space enough to tell his tale. Drunk or sober, Falconnet was afoot and alert, shouting his orders to the Englishmen who were scrambling for their arms, and to the Indians who came swarming up from the lodges.

Whilst we looked, the Cherokees scattered like a company of trained gillies to beat us out of cover; and when the hunt was fairly up, the baronet-captain set his men in marching order to surround the wigwam of the captives.

As yet there was time for a swift retreat up the valley, or at least for the choosing of some battle-field of our own where the enemy need not outnumber us twenty to one; and again I urged Richard to bestir himself. But it was the sight of Falconnet's troopers deploying to surround the tepee-lodge, and not any word of mine, that broke his merriment in the midst.

At a bound he was up and handing me my sword.

"Good by, Jack; go you whilst you can. You'll be like to meet Eph and the Catawba coming in; turn them back and tell them to bide their time."

"But you?" I would say.

"My place is inside of that soldier-cordon our friend is drawing about his dove-cote. I shall be at hand when she needs me, as I promised."

"Aye, so you may be; but not alone," said I; and with that we fell to running like a pair of doubling foxes through the wood on the steep slope behind the lodge, striving with might and main to gain the laurel thicket whence we had made our first reconnaissance before the converging lines of the redcoat cordon should close and shut us out.

We did it by the skin of our teeth, diving to cover through the closing gap not a second too soon. When we were in and hugging the bare ground under the scanty leafing of the laurel, I take no shame in saying that I would have given a king's ransom to be at large again. Had there been but one of us the covert would have been cramped enough; and I was painfully conscious that my borrowed coat of scarlet was but a poor thing to hide in.

To make it worse, Falconnet, who had lagged behind at the fire, was now heaping fresh fuel on, and this reviving of the blaze made the place as light as day. With the nearest links in the redcoat chain no more than a pike's-length at our backs, we dared not stir or breathe a word; and, all in all, we might have been taken like rats in a trap had any one of the sentries on our side of the circle chanced to look behind him.

Having repaired the fire to his liking, the troop-captain came up to pass a word or two with his lieutenant. They spoke guardedly, but we could hear—could not help hearing.

"You have seen nothing, Gordon?"

"Nothing, as yet."

"Make the round again and tell the men 'twill be ten gold joes and a double allowance of liquor to the man who first claps eyes on any one of the four."

The subaltern went to carry out the order, and Falconnet fell to pacing back and forth before the little wigwam. I could see his face at the turn where the firelight fell upon him; 'twas the face of a villain at his worst, namely, a villain half in liquor. There was a lurking devil of passion peering out of the sensuous eyes; and ever and anon he stopped as if to listen for some sound within the captives' lodge.

When the lieutenant returned to make his report, he was given another order to cap the first.

"Your line is too close-drawn and too conspicuous," said the captain, shortly. "Move the men out fifty paces in advance, and bid them take cover."

"They will scarce be within hail of each other at that," says the lieutenant.

"Near enough, with ten gold pieces to sharpen their eyesight. Go you with them and hold them to their work."

The line was presently extended as the order ran, each link in the cordon chain advancing fifty paces on its front into the forest. Dick fetched a deep sigh of relief; and I thought less of the thin-leafed cover and the scarlet coat of me.

Falconnet had resumed the pacing of his sentry beat before the lodge, but when his men were out of sight and hearing he stopped short and stole on tiptoe to lay his ear to the flap.

"So, you are awake, Mistress Margery? Send your woman out. I would speak with you—alone."

There was no reply, but we could both hear the low anguished voice of our dear lady praying for help in this her hour of trial. Dick inched aside to give me room, freeing his weapon, as I did mine. We were not over-quiet about it, but the captain of horse was too hot upon his own devil's business to look behind him.

Having no answer from within, he stooped to loose the flap. It was pegged down on the inside. He rose and whipped out his sword; the firelight fell upon his face again and we saw it as it had been the face of a foul fiend from the pit.

"Open!" he commanded; and when there was neither reply nor obedience, he cut the flap free with his sword and flung it back.

The two women within the wigwam were on their knees before a little crucifix hanging on the lodge wall. So much we saw as we broke cover and ran in upon the despoiler. Then the battle-madness came upon us and I, for one, saw naught but the tense-drawn face of a swordsman fighting for his life—a face in which the hot flush of evil passion had given place to the ashen graying of fear.

We drove at him together, Dick and I, and so must needs fall afoul of each other clumsily, giving him time to spring back and so to miss the claymore stroke which else would have shorn him to the middle. Then ensued as pretty a bit of blade work as any master of the old cut-and-thrust school could wish to see; and through it all this king's captain of horse seemed to bear a charmed life.

There was no punctilio of the code of honor in this duel a outrance. Knowing our time was short, we fought as men who fight with halters round their necks; not to decide a nice point at issue, but to kill this accursed villain as we would kill a mad dog or a venomous reptile whose living on imperiled the life and honor of the woman we loved.

Thrice, whilst I held him in play, Dick rushed in to end it with a scythe-sweep of the broadsword; and thrice the Scottish death was turned aside by the flashing circle of steel wherewith the man striving shrewdly to gain time made shift to shield himself.

Yet it was not in flesh and blood to fend the double onslaught for more than some brief minute or two. Play as he would—and no schlaegermeister, of my old field-marshal's picked troop could best him at this game of parry and defense—he must give ground step by step; slowly at the pressing of the Ferara, and in quick backward leaps when the great broadsword bit at him.

For the first few bouts he withstood us in grim silence. But now Richard cut in again and the claymore stroke, less skilfully turned aside, brought him to his knees. This broke his bull courage somewhat, and though he was afoot and on guard before my point could reach him, he began to bellow lustily for help.

As you would suppose, the call was all unneeded. At the first clash of steel the outlying troopers were up and swarming to the rescue; and now on all sides came the trampling rush of the in-closing cordon line.

Had Falconnet held his ground a moment longer he would have had us fast in the jaws of the trooper-trap; but 'tis the fatal flaw in mere brute courage that it will break at the pinch. No sooner did the volunteer captain catch a glimpse of his up-coming reinforcements than he must needs show us a clean pair of heels, running like a craven coward and shouting madly to his men to close with us and cut us down.

"After him!" roared Dick, who was by now as rage-mad as any berserker; and with a cut and thrust to right and left for the nipping trap-jaws we were out and away in chase.

Now you may mark this as you will; that whilst the devil hath need of his bond-servant he will come between with a miracle if need be to keep the villain breath of life in his vassal. Three bounds beyond the closing trap-jaws fetched us, pursued and pursuers, to the open camp field; and here the devil's miracle was wrought. Out of the forest fringe, out of the skirting of undergrowth, out of the very earth, as it seemed, uprose a yelling mob of Cherokees—the detachment we had met in the cavern returned in the very nick of time to cut us off from the pursuit and to ring us in a whooping circle of death.

"Back to back, lad!" I shouted; and 'twas thus we met their onslaught.

In such a fray as that which followed 'tis the trivial things that leave their mark upon the memory. For one, I recall the curious thrill of master-might it gave me to feel the play of Jennifer's great shoulder muscles against my back in his plying of the heavy claymore. For another, I remember the sickening qualm I had when the warm blood of my second—or mayhap 'twas the third—gushed out upon my sword hand, and I remember, too, how the impaled one, driven in upon the blade by the pressure of his fellows behind, would lay hold of the sharp steel and try in the death throe to withdraw it.

But after that sickening qualm I recall only this; that I could not free the sword for another thrust, and whilst I tugged and fought for space they dragged me down and buried me, these fierce tribesmen, piling so thick upon me that sight and sound and breath went out together, and I was but an atom crushed to earth beneath the human avalanche.



XXIX

IN WHICH, HAVING DANCED, WE PAY THE PIPER

Measured by the sense which takes cognizance of pauses it seemed no more than a moment between the stamping out of breath and its gasping recovery. But in the interval the scene had shifted from the open savanna to a thinly set grove of oaks with the stream brawling through the midst.

To the biggest of the trees I was tightly bound; and a little way apart a fire, newly kindled, smoked and blazed up fitfully. By the light of the fire a good score of the Cherokees were gathering deadfalls and dry branches to heap beside me; and from the camp below, the Indian lodges of which were in plain view beyond the intervening horse meadow, other savages were hurrying to join the wood carriers.

So far as these hasting preliminaries applied to me, their meaning was not difficult to read. I was to be burned at the stake in proper savage fashion. But Richard Jennifer—what had become of him? A sound, half sigh, half groan, told me where to look. Hard by, bound to a tree as I was, and so near that with a free hand I could have touched him, was my poor lad.

"Dick!" I cried.

He turned his head as the close-drawn thongs permitted and gave me a smile as loving-tender as a woman's.

"Aye, Jack; they have us hard and fast this time. I have been praying you'd never come alive enough to feel the fire."

"We were taken together?" So much I dared ask.

"In the same onset. 'Twas but a question of clock ticks in that back-to-back business. But they paid scot and lot," this with an inching nod toward a row of naked bodies propped sitting against a fallen tree; nine of them in all, one with its severed head between its knees, and three others showing the gaping hacks and hewings of the great broadsword.

"They've fetched them here to see us burn," he went on. "But by the gods, we have the warrant of two good blades and Ephraim Yeates's hunting-knife that the only fires they'll ever see are those of hell."

"Yeates?" I queried. "Then they have taken him and the Catawba, as well?"

"Not alive, you may be sure, else we should have them for company. But it has a black look for our friends that the flying column we met in the stream-cave came back so soon. Moreover, the bodies of the three peace-pipe smokers were found and brought in; that will be the Great Bear holding his head in his hands at the end of yonder bloody masquerade."

"I guessed as much. God rest our poor comrades!"

"Aye; and God help Madge! 'Tis no time for reproaches, but amongst us we have signed her death warrant with our bunglings."

"If it were only death!" I groaned.

"'Tis just that, Jack," said he; "no better, mayhap, but no worse. When we were downed by that screeching mob, she was out and on her knees to Falconnet, beseeching him to spare us. He put her off smoothly at first, saying 'twas the Indians' affair—that they would not be balked of their vengeance by any interference of his. But when she only begged the more piteously, he showed his true colors, rapping out that we should have as swift a quittance as we had meant to give him, and that within the hour she should be the mistress of Appleby and free to marry an English gentleman."

"Well?" said I, making sure that now at last he must know all.

"At that she stood before him bravely, and I saw that all the time she had had the Catawba's knife hidden in the folds of her gown. 'You have spoken truth for once, Captain Falconnet; I shall be free,' she said. 'Come and tell me when you have added these to your other murders.'"

"And then?"

"Then she went back to her prison wigwam, walking through the rabble of redcoats and redskins as proudly as the Scottish Mary went to the block."

"She will do it, think you?" I queried, fearful lest she would, but more fearful lest her courage should fail at the pinch.

"Never doubt it. Good Catholic as she is, there is martyr blood in her on the mother's side, and that will help her to die unsullied. And God nerve her to it, say I."

I said "Amen" to that; and thereupon we both fell silent, watching as condemned men on the gallows the busy preparations for our taking off.

Again, as in the late battle, it was the trivial things that moved me most. Chief among them the grinning row of dead Indians propped against the fallen tree is the constant background for all the memory pictures of that waiting interval, and I can see those stiffening corpses now, some erect, as if defying us; some lopping this way or that, as if their bones had gone to water at the touch of the steel.

I know not why these poor relics of mortality should have held me fascinated as they did. Yet when I would look away, through the vista to where the light of the great fire in the savanna camp played luridly upon the Indian lodges, or, nearer at hand, upon the savages gathering the wood to burn us with, this ghastly file of the dead drew me irresistibly, and I must needs pass the fearsome figures in review again, marking the staring eyes and unnatural postures, and the circular blood-black patches on the heads of the three peace-men whom Yeates and the Catawba had scalped.

While they were making ready for the burning, our executioners were strangely silent; but when the work was done they formed in a semicircle to front the row of corpses and set up a howling chant that would have put a band of Mohammedan dervishes to the blush.

"'Tis the death song for the slain," said Richard; and while it lasted, this moving tableau of naked figures, keeping time in a weird stamping dance to the rising and falling ululation of the chant, held us spellbound.

But we were not long suffered to be mere curious onlookers. In its dismalest flight the death song ended in a shrill hubbub, and the dancers turned as one man to face us.

I hope it may never be your lot, my dears, to meet and endure such a horrid glare of human ferocity as that these wrought-up avengers of blood bent upon us. 'Twas more unnerving than aught that had gone before; more terrible, I thought, than aught that could come after. Yet, as to this, you shall judge for yourselves.

The pause was brief, and when a lad ran up to cut the thongs that bound us from the middle up, the torture-play began in deadly earnest. Whilst the Indian youth was slashing at the deerskin, Richard gave me my cue.

"'Tis the knife and hatchet play; they are loosing us to give us freedom to shrink and dodge. Look straight before you and never flinch a hair, as you would keep the life in you from one minute to the next!"

"Trust me," said I. "We must eke it out as long as we can, if only to give our dear lady time for another prayer or two. Mayhap she will name us in them; God knows, our need is sore enough."

The lad ran back, and a warrior stood out, juggling his tomahawk in air. He made a feint to cast it at Richard, but instead sent it whizzing at me.

That first missile was harder to face unflinching than were all the others. I saw it leave the thrower's hand; saw it coming straight, as I would think, to split my skull. The prompting to dodge was well-nigh masterful enough to override the strongest will. Yet I did make shift to hold fast, and in mid flight the twirling ax veered aside to miss me by a hair's-breadth, gashing the tree at my ear when it struck.

"Bravo! well met!" cried Richard; and then, betwixt his teeth: "Here comes mine."

As he spoke, a second tomahawk was sped. I heard it strike with a dull crash that might have been on flesh and bone, or on oak-bark—I could not tell. I dared not look aside till Richard's taunting laugh gave me leave to breathe again.

The Indians answered the laugh with a yell; and now the marksmen stood out quickly one after another and for a little space the air was full of hurtling missiles. You will read in the romances of the wondrous skill of these savages in such diversions as these; how they will pin the victim to a tree and never miss of sticking knife or hatchet within the thickness of the blade where they will. But you must take these tales with a dash of allowance for the romancers' fancy. Truly, these Indians of ours threw well and skilfully; 'tis a part of the only trade they know—the trade of war—to send a weapon true to the mark. None the less, some of the missiles flew wide; and now and then one would nip the cloth of sleeve or body covering—and the flesh beneath it, as well.

Dick had more of the nippings than I; and though he kept up a running fire of taunts and gibing flings at the marksmen, I could hear the gritting oaths aside when they pinked him.

Notwithstanding, the worst of these miscasts fell to my lot. A hatchet, sped by the clumsiest hand of all, missed its curving, turned, and the helve of it struck me fair in the stomach. Not all the parting pangs of death, as I fondly believe, will lay a heavier toll on fortitude than did this griping-stroke which I must endure standing erect. 'Tis no figure of speech to say that I would have given the reversion of a kingdom, and a crown to boot, for leave to double over and groan out the agony of it.

Happily for us, there were no women with the band, so we were spared the crueler refinements of these ante-burning torments; the flaying alive by inch-bits, and the sticking of blazing splints of pitchwood in the flesh to make death a thing to be prayed for. There was naught of this; and tiring finally of the marksman play, the Indians made ready to burn us. Some ran to recover the spent weapons; others made haste to heap the wood in a broad circle about our trees; and the chief, with three or four to help, renewed the deer-thong lashings.

'Twas in the rebinding that this headman, a right kingly-looking savage as these barbarians go, thrust a bit of paper into my hand, and gave me time to glance its message out by the light of the fire. 'Twas a line from Margery; and this is what she said:

_Dear Heart:

Though you must needs believe my love is pledged to your good friend and mine, 'tis yours, and yours alone, my lion-hearted one. I am praying the good God to give you dying grace, and me the courage to follow you quickly. Margery.

This by the hand of Tallachama._

For one brief instant a wave of joy caught and flung me upon its highest crest, and all these savage tormentors could do to me became as naught. Then the true meaning of this her brave Ave atque vale smote me like a space-flung meteor, and the joy-wave became an ocean of despair to engulf me in its blackest depths. The letter was never meant for me; 'twas for Richard Jennifer, who, as she would think, must know the story of her marriage to his friend and must believe her love went with the giving of her hand. And she named him Lion-Heart because he was brave, and true, and strong, like that first English Richard of the kingly line.

I thrust the message back upon the bearer of it, begging him in dumb show to give it quickly to my companion. I knew not at the time if he did it, being so crushed and blinded by this fresh misery. But when the Indians drew off to ring us in a chanting circle for the final act, I would not let the lad see my face for fear he might fathom the heart-break in me and know the cause of it.

'Twas at this crisis, when all was ready and one had run to fetch the fire, that I heard a smothered oath from Dick and saw the Indian who was coming up to fire the wood heaps drop his brand and tread upon it.

"Ecod!" said a voice, courtier-like and smoothly modulated. "'Tis most devilish lucky I came, Captain Ireton. Another moment and they would have grilled you in the king's uniform—a rank treason, to say naught of poor Jack Warden left without a clout to cover him."

It needed not the glance aside to name mine enemy. But I would not pleasure him with an answer. Neither would Richard Jennifer. He stood silent for a little space, smiling and nursing his chin in one hand, as his habit was. Then he spoke again.

"I came to bid you God-speed, gentlemen. You tumbled bravely into my little trap. I made no doubt you'd follow where the lady led, and so you did. But you'll turn back from this, I do assure you, if there be any virtue in an Indian barbecue."

At this Richard could hold in no longer.

"Curse you!" he gritted. "Do you mean that you kidnapped Mistress Stair to draw us out of hiding?"

"Truly," said this arch-fiend, smiling again. "Most unluckily for you, you both stood in my way,—you see I am speaking of it now as a thing past,—and I chanced upon this thought of killing two birds with the one stone; nay, three, I should say, if you count the lady in."

"Have done!" choked Richard, in a voice thick with impotent rage. "Give place, you hound, and let your savages to their work!"

"At your pleasure, Mr. Jennifer. I have no fancy for funeral baked meats, hot or cold, though they be made, as now, to furnish forth a marriage supper. I bid you good night, gentlemen. I'll go and make that call upon the lady which you were so rude as to interrupt a little while ago." And with that he turned his back upon us and strode away, forgetting to tell his redskinned myrmidons to strip me of that king's uniform he was so loath to have me burned in.

The Cherokees waited till the master-executioner was out of sight among the trees. Then they set up their infernal howling again, and the fire-lighter ran to fetch a fresh brand.

"Courage, lad! 'twill soon be over now," said I, hearing a groan from my poor Dick.

His reply was a chattering curse, not upon Falconnet or the Indians, but upon his malady, the tertian fever.

"Now, by all the fiends! I'm chilling again, Jack!" he gasped. "If these cursed wood-wolves mark it, they'll set it down to woman cowardice and that will break my heart!"

Again I bade him be of good courage, assuring him, not derisively, as it looks when 'tis written out, that the fire would presently medicine the chilling. In the middle of the saying the lighted brand was fetched and thrust among our fagotings, and the upward-curling smoke wreaths made me gasp and strangle at the finish.

For a little time after the sucking in of that first smoke-breath—nature's anodyne for any of her poor creatures doomed to die by fire—I saw and heard less clearly and suffered only by anticipation. But to this day the smell of burning pine-wood is like a sleeping potion to me; and the sleep it brings is full of dreams vaguely troubled.

So, while the Indians danced and leaped about us, brandishing their weapons and chanting the captives' death song, and while the blue and yellow tongues of flame mounted from twig to twig, climbing stealthily to flick at us like little vanishing demon whips, I saw and heard and felt as one remote from all the torture turmoil of the moment. Through the dimming haze of sleeping sensibility the dancing savages became as marionettes in some cunning puppet show; and the blood stained figures stiffening against their log took shapes less horrifying.

'Twas Dick's voice, coming, as it seemed, from a mighty distance, that broke the spell and brought me back to quickened agonies. He spoke in panting gasps, as the smoke would let him.

"One word, Jack, before we go—go to our own place. He said—he said she would be free to—to marry him. Tell me ... O God in Heaven!"

His agony was a lash to cut me deeper than any flicking demon whip of flame, yet I must needs add to it.

"Aye, Richard, I have wronged you, wronged you desperately; can you hear me yet? I say I have wronged you, and I shall die the easier if you'll forgive—"

Once more the smoke, rising again in denser clouds, cut me off, and through the blinding blue haze of it I saw the Indians running up with green branches to beat it down lest it should spoil their sport oversoon by smothering us out of hand.

With the chance to gasp and breathe again I would have confessed in full to Richard Jennifer and had him shrive me if he would. But when I called, he did not answer. His head was rolling from side to side, and his handsome young face was all drawn and distorted as in the awful grimaces of the death throe.

You will not wonder that I could not look at him; that I looked away for very pity's sake, praying that I might quickly breathe the flames, as I made sure he had, and so be the sooner past the anguish crisis.

There was good hope that the prayer would have a speedy answer. The fires were burning clearer now, leaping up in broad dragon's tongues of flame from the outer edges of the fagot piles to curtain off all that lay beyond. Through the luminous flame-veil the capering savages took on shapes the most weird and grotesque; and when I had a glimpse of the dead men's row, each hideous face in it seemed to wear a grin of leering triumph.

Thus far there had been never a puff of wind to fan the blaze. But now above the shrilling of the Indian chant and the crackling of the flames a low growl of thunder trembled in the upper air, and a gentle breeze swept through the tree-tops.

So now I would commend my soul to God, making sure that the breath He gave would go out on the wings of the first gust that should come to drive the fiery veil inward. But when the gust came it was from behind; a sweeping besom to beat down the leaping dragons' tongues; a pouring flood of blessed coolness to turn the ebbing life-tide and to set the dulled senses once more keenly alert.

With the wind came the rain, a passing summer-night's shower of great drops spattering on the leaves above and dripping thence to fall hissing in the fires. Then the thunder growled again; and into the monotonous droning of the Indian chant, or rather rising sharp and clear above it, came a sudden rattling fire of musketry from the camp in the savanna—this, and the sharp skirling of the troop captain's whistle shrilling the assembly.

While yet the flames lay flattened in the wind, I saw the Indians wheel and bound away to the rescue of their camp like a pack of hounds in full cry. In a trice they were wallowing through the stream at the foot of the powder boulder; and then, as the flames leaped up again, a dark form burst through the fiery barrier, my bonds were cut, and a strong hand plucked me out of the scorching hell-pit.

If I did aught to help it was all mechanical. I do remember dimly some fierce struggle to free my legs from the blazing tangle; this, and the swelling sob of joy at the sight of the faithful Catawba hacking at Dick's lashings and dragging him also free of the fire. And you may believe the welcome tears came to ease the pain of my seared eyes when my poor lad—I had thought him gone past human help—took two staggering steps and flung his arms about my neck.

Uncanoola gave us no time to come by easy stages to full-wit sanity. In a twinkling he had pounced upon us to crush us one upon the other behind the larger tree. And now I come upon another of those flitting instants so crowded with happenings that the swiftest pen must seem to make them lag. 'Twas all in a heart-beat, as it were: the Catawba's freeing of us; his flinging us to earth behind the tree; a spurt of blinding yellow flame from the foot of the powder-cliff, and a booming, jarring shock like that of an earthquake.

The momentary glare of the yellow flash lit up a scene most awe-inspiring. The spouting fountain of fire at the base of the great powder-rock was thick with flying missiles; and on high the very cliff itself was tottering and crumbling. So much I saw; then the Catawba sprang up to haul us afoot by main strength, and to rush us, with an arm for each, headlong through the wood toward the valley head.

But Dick hung back, and when the dull thunder of the falling rocks, the crash of the tumbling cliff and the shrill death yells of the doomed ones came to our ears, he fought loose from the Indian and flung himself down, crying as if his heart would break.

"O God! she's lost, she's lost!—and I have missed the chance to die with her or for her!"



XXX

HOW EPHRAIM YEATES PRAYED FOR HIS ENEMIES

However much or little the Catawba understood of Richard Jennifer's grief or its cause, the faithful Indian had a thing to do and he did it, loosing his grasp of me to turn and fall upon Dick with pullings and haulings and buffetings, fit to bring a man alive out of a very stiffening rigor of despair.

So, in a hand-space he had him up, and we were pressing on again, in midnight darkness once we had passed beyond the light of our grilling fires. No word was spoken; under the impatient urging of the Indian there was little breath to spare for speech. But when Richard's afterthought had set its fangs in him, he called a halt and would not be denied.

"Go on, you two, if you are set upon it," he said. "I must go back. Bethink you, Jack; what if she be only maimed and not killed outright. 'Tis too horrible! I'm going back, I say."

The Catawba grunted his disgust.

"Captain Jennif' talk fas'; no run fas'. What think? White squaw yonder—no yonder," pointing first forward and then back in the direction of the stricken camp.

Richard spun around and gripped the Indian by the shoulders. "Then she is alive and safe?" he burst out. "Speak, friend, whilst I leave the breath in you to do it!"

"Ugh!" said the chief, in nowise moved either by Jennifer's vehemence or by the dog-like shake. "What for Captain Jennif' think papoose thinks 'bout the Gray Wolf and poor Injun? Catch um white squaw firs'; then blow um up Chelakee camp and catch um Captain Jennif' and Captain Long-knife if can. Heap do firs' thing firs', and las' thing las'. Wah!"

It was the longest speech this devoted ally of ours was ever known to make; and having made it he went dumb again save for his urgings of us forward. But presently both he and I had our hands full with the poor lad. The swift transition from despair to joy proved too much for Dick; and, besides, the fever was in his blood and he was grievously burned.

So we went stumbling on through the cloud-darkened wood, locked arm in arm like three drunken men, tripping over root snares and bramble nets spread for our feet, and getting well sprinkled by the dripping foliage. And at the last, when we reached the ravine at the valley's head, Dick was muttering in the fever delirium and we were well-nigh carrying him a dead weight between us.

'Twas a most heart-breaking business, getting the poor lad up that rock-ladder of escape in the darkness; for though I had come out of the fire with fewer burns than the roasting of me warranted, the battle preceding it had opened the old sword wound in my shoulder. So, taking it all in all, I was but a short-breathed second to the faithful Catawba.

None the less, we tugged it through after some laborious fashion, and were glad enough when the steep ascent gave place to leveler going, and we could sniff the fragrance of the plateau pines and feel their wire-like needles under foot.

By this the shower cloud had passed and the stars were coming out, but it was still pitch black under the pines; so dark that I started like a nervous woman and went near to panic when a horse snorted at my very ear, and a voice, bodiless, as it seemed, said; "Well, now; the Lord be praised! if here ain't the whole enduring—"

What Ephraim Yeates would have said, or did say, was lost upon me. For now my poor Dick's strength was quite spent, and when the chief and I were easing him to lie full length upon the ground, there was a quick little cry out of the darkness, a swish of petticoats, and my lady darted in to fall upon Richard in a very transport of pity.

"Oh, my poor Dick! they have killed you!" she sobbed; "oh, cruel, cruel!" Then she lashed out at us. "Why don't you strike a light? How can I find and dress his hurts in the dark?"

"Your pardon, Mistress Margery," I said; "'tis only that the fever has overcome him. He has no sore hurts, as I believe, save the fire-scorching."

"A light!" she commanded; "I must have a light and see for myself."

We had to humor her, though it was something against prudence. Ephraim found dry punk in a rotten log, and firing it with the flint and steel of a great king's musket—one of his reavings from the enemy—soon had a pine-knot torch for her. She gave it to the Catawba to hold; and while she was cooing over her patient and binding up his burns in some simples gathered near at hand by the Indian, I had the story of the double rescue from the old hunter.

Set forth in brief, that which had come as a miracle to Dick and me figured as a daring bit of strategy made possible by the emptying of the Indian camp at our torture spectacle.

Yeates and the Catawba, following out the plan agreed upon, had come within spying distance while yet we were in the midst of that hopeless back-to-back battle, and had most wisely held aloof. But later, when every Indian of the Cherokee band was busy at our torture trees, they set to work.

With no watch to give the alarm, 'twas easy to rifle the Indian wigwams of the firearms and ammunition. The latter they threw into the stream; the muskets they loaded and trained over a fallen tree at the northern edge of the savanna, bringing them to bear pointblank upon the light-horse guard gathered again around the great fire.

The next step was the cutting out of the women; this was effected whilst the baronet-captain was paying his courtesy call on us. Like the looting of the Indian camp, 'twas quickly planned and daringly done; it asked but the quieting of the two trooper guards on the forest side of the tepee-lodge, a warning word to Margery and her woman, and a shadow-like flitting with them over the dead bodies of their late jailers to the shelter of the wood.

Once free of the camp, Yeates had hurried his charges to a place of temporary safety farther up the valley, leaving the Catawba to cross the stream to lay a train of dampened powder to the makeshift magazine. When he had led the women to a place of safety, the old man left them and ran back to his masked battery of loaded muskets. Here, at an owl-cry signal from Uncanoola, he opened fire upon the redcoats.

The outworking of the coup de main was a triumph for the old borderer's shrewd generalship. At the death-dealing volley the Englishmen were thrown into confusion; whilst the Indians, summoned by the firing and the shrilling of the captain's whistle, dashed blindly into the trap. At the right moment Uncanoola touched off his powder train and cut in with a clear field for his rescue of Dick and me.

Of the complete success of these various climaxings, Ephraim Yeates had his first assurance when we three came safely to the rendezvous; for, after firing his masked battery, the old hunter lost no time in rejoining the women and in hastening with them out of the valley. Had these three been afoot we might have overtaken them; but Yeates had been lucky enough to stumble upon the black mare peacefully cropping the grass in a little glade; and with this mount for Margery and her tire-woman he had easily outpaced us.

All this I had from Yeates what time Margery was pouring the wine and oil of womanly sympathy into Richard's woundings; and I may confess that whilst the ear was listening to the hunter's tale, the eye was taking note of these her tender ministrations, and the heart was setting them down to the score of a great love which would not be denied. 'Twas altogether as I would have had it; and yet the thought came unbidden that she might spare a niggard moment and the breath to ask me how I did. And because she would not, I do think my burns smarted the crueler.

It was to have surcease of these extra smartings that I turned my back upon the trio under the flaring torch and took up with Ephraim Yeates the pressing question of the moment.

"As I take it, we may not linger here," I said. "Have you marked out a line of retreat?"

The old borderer was busied with his loot of the Indian camp—'twas not in his nature to come off empty-handed, however hard pressed he had been for time. In the raffle of it, guns and pistols, dressed skins and warrior finery, he came upon my good old blade and Richard's great claymore—trophies claimed by the head men of the Cherokees after our taking, as we made no doubt.

"Found 'em hanging in the lodge that usen to belong to the Great Bear," said the hunter, and then with grim humor: "'Lowed to keep 'em to ricollect ye by if so be ye was foreordained and predestinated to go up in a fiery chariot, like the good old Elijah." The weapons disposed of, he made answer to my query. "Ez for making tracks immejitly, if not sooner, I allow there ain't no two notions about that. But I'm dad-daddled if I know which-a-way to put out, Cap'n John, and that's the gospil fact."

"Why not strike for the Great Trace, and so go back the way the powder convoy came?" I asked.

It could be done, he said, but the hazard was great. 'Twas out of all reason to hope that there were no survivors left in the sunken valley to carry the news of the earthquake massacre. That news once cried abroad in the near-by Cowee Towns, the entire Tuckasege nation would turn out to run us down. Moreover, the avengers would look to find us in the only practicable horse-path leading eastward.

"Ez I'm telling you right now, Cap'n John, we made one more blunder in this here onfall of our'n, owin' to our having ne'er a seventh son of a seventh son amongst us to look a little ways ahead. Where we flashed in the pan was in not making our rendyvoo down yonder where you and Cap'n Dick got in. Ever' last one of 'em able to crawl is a-making straight for that crivvis dodge-hole right now, and if we was there we could do 'em like the Gileadites did the men o' Ephraim at the passages o' the Jordan."

Fresh as I was from the torture fire, I could not forbear a shudder at this old man's savagery.

"Kill them in cold blood?" I would say.

"Anan?" he queried, as not understanding my point of view; and I let the matter rest. He was of those who slay and spare not where an enemy is concerned.

But when we came to consider of it there seemed to be no alternative to the eastward flitting by way of the Great Trace. To the west and south there was only the trackless wilderness; and to the north no white settlement nearer than that of the over-mountain folk on the Watauga. I asked if we might hope to reach this.

"'Tis a long fifty mile ez the crow flies, over e'enabout the mountainousest patch o' land that ever laid out o' doors," was the hunter's reply. "And there ain't ne'er a deer-track, ez I knows on, to p'int the way."

"Then we must ride eastward and run the risk of pursuit by the Tuckaseges," said I.

"Ez I reckon, that's about the long and short of it. And I do everlastedly despise to make that poor little gal jump her hoss and ride skimper-scamper again, when she's been fair living a-horseback for a fortnight."

"She will not fail you," I ventured to say, adding: "But Jennifer is in poor fettle for making speed."

"It's ride or be skulped for him, and I allow he'll ride," quoth the old hunter, hastening his preparations for the start. "Reckon we can get him on a hoss right now."

I went to see. Margery rose at my approach, and even in the poor light I could see her draw herself up as if she would hold me at my proper distance.

"Your patient, Mistress Margery,—We must mount and ride at once. Is he fit?"

"No."

"But we must be far to the eastward before daybreak."

"I can not help it. If you make him ride to-night you will finish what those cruel savages began, Captain Ireton."

"We have little choice—none, I should say."

"Oh, you are bitter hard!" she cried, though wherein my offending lay just then I was wholly at a loss to know.

"'Tis your privilege to say so," I rejoined. "But as for making Dick ride, that will be but the kindest cruelty. We are only a little way from the nearest Indian towns, and if the daylight find us here—"

"Spare me," she broke in; and with that she turned shortly and asked Ephraim Yeates to put her in her saddle.

Richard was still in the fever stupor, but he roused himself at my urging and let us set him upon his beast. Once safe in the saddle, we lashed him fast like a prisoner, with a forked tree-branch at his back to hold him erect. This last was the old hunter's invention and 'twas most ingenious. The forked limb, in shape like a Y, was set astride the cantle, with the lower ends thonged stoutly to Dick's legs and to the girths. Thus the upright stem of the inverted Y became an easy back-rest for the sick man; and when he was securely lashed thereto there was little danger for him save in some stumbling of the beast he rode.

When all was ready we had first to find our way down from the mountain top; and now even the old borderer and the Indian confessed their inability to do aught but retrace their steps by the only route they knew: namely, by that ravine which we had twice traversed in daylight, and up which they had led the captured horses in the dusk.

This route promised all the perils of a gantlet-running, since by it we must take the risk of meeting the fleeing fugitives from the convoy camp, if the explosion had spared any fit to lift and carry the vengeance-cry. But here again there was no alternative, and we set us in order for the descent, with Yeates and the Catawba ahead, the women and Dick in the midst, and her Apostolic Majesty's late captain of hussars, masquerading as a British trooper, to bring on the rear.

Once in motion beneath the blue-black shadows of the pines, I quickly lost all sense of direction. After we had ridden in wordless silence a short half hour or less, and I supposed we should be nearing the head of our descending ravine, our little cavalcade was halted suddenly in a thickset grove of the pines, and Ephraim Yeates appeared at my stirrup to say:

"H'ist ye off your nag, Cap'n John, and let's take a far'well squinch at the inimy whilst we can."

"Where? what enemy?" I would ask, slipping from the saddle at his word.

"Why, the hoss-captain's varmints, to be sure; or what-all the abomination o' desolation has left of 'em. We ain't more than a cat's jump from the edge o' the big rock where we first sot eyes on 'em this morning."

I saw not what was to be gained by any such long-range espial in the darkness. None the less, I followed the old man to the cliff's edge. He was wiser in his forecastings than I was in mine. There was a thing to look at, and light enough to see it by. One of the missile stones, it seems, had crashed into the great fire, scattering the brands in all directions. The pine-bough troop shelters were ablaze, and creeping serpents of fire were worming their way hither and yon over the year-old leaf beds in the wood. Ever and anon some pine sapling in the path of these fiery serpents would go up in a torch-like flare; and so, as I say, there was light enough.

What we looked down upon was not inaptly pictured out by Ephraim Yeates's Scripture phrase, the abomination of desolation. Every vestige of the camp save the glowing skeletons of the troop shelters had disappeared, and the swarded savanna was become a blackened chaos-blot on the fair woodland scene. I have said that the powder-sheltering boulder was a cliff for size; the mighty upheaval of the explosion had toppled it in ruins into the stream, and huge fragments the bigness of a wine-butt had been hurled with the storm of lighter debris broadcast upon the camp.

At first we saw no sign of life in all the firelit space. But a moment later, when three or four of the sapling torches blazed up together, we made out some half dozen figures of human beings—whether red or white we could not tell—stumbling and reeling about among the rocks like blind men drunken.

At sight of these the old hunter doffed his cap and fell upon his knees with hands uplifted to pour out his zealot's soul in the awful sentences of the Psalmist's imprecation.

"'Let God arise, and let His inimies be scattered; let them also that hate Him flee before Him. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away; and like as the wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God....'"



XXXI

IN WHICH WE MAKE A FORCED MARCH

It could have been but little short of midnight when we came down into the Great Trace near the ambush ground where we had set our trap for the peace men.

The night had cleared most beautifully, and overhead the stars were burning like points of white fire in the black dome of the heavens. As often happens after a shower, the night shrillings of the forest were in fullest tide; and a whip-will's-widow, disturbed by our approach, fluttered to a higher perch and set up his plaintive protest.

At our turning eastward on the trace, the old hunter massed our little company as compactly as the path allowed, and giving us the word to follow cautiously, tossed his bridle rein to the Catawba and went on ahead to feel out the way.

This rearrangement set me to ride abreast with Margery; and for the first time since that fateful night in the upper room at Appleby Hundred we were together and measurably alone.

Since death might be lying in wait for us at any turn in the winding bridle-path, I had no mind to break the strained silence. But, womanlike, she would not miss the chance to thrust at me.

"Are you not afire with shame, Captain Ireton?" she said, bitterly; and then: "How you must despise me!"

I knew not what she meant; but being most anxious for her safety, I begged her not to talk, putting it all upon the risk we ran in passing the outlet of the sunken valley. Now, as you have long since learned, my tongue was but a skilless servant; and though I sought to make the command the gentlest plea, she took instant umbrage and struck back smartly.

"You need not make the danger an excuse. I will be still; and when I speak to you again, you will be willing enough to hear me, I promise you!"

"Nay, then, dear lady; you must not take it so!" I protested. "'Tis my misfortune to be ever blundering."

But to this she gave me no answer at all; and barring a word or two of heartening for her serving woman, she never opened her lips again throughout the passage perilous.

By good hap we came to the crossing of the cavern stream without meeting any foeman; and on the farther side of the shallow ford we found the old borderer awaiting us.

"Ez I allow, we've smelt the bait in the trap and come off with whole bones, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego," he said, mixing metaphor, Scripture phrase and frontier idiom as was his wont. Then he put a leg over his horse and gave the stirrup-word: "From now on, old Jehu, the son o' Nimshi, is the hoss-whipper we've got to beat. Get ye behind, Cap'n John, and give the hoss that lags a half inch 'r so of your sword-p'int."

Then and there began a night flight long to be remembered. Down the valley of the swift river to the ford where Yeates and I had crossed after the mock rescue of Margery the night before, we let the horses pick the way as they could. But once beyond the ford, where the trace was wider and the footing less precarious, we plied whip and spur, pushing the saddle-beasts for every stride we could get out of them in the blind race.

I have marveled often that we came not once to grief in all this long night-gallop through the darkness. There was every chance for it. The over-arching trees of the great forest shut out all the starlight, and the trace was no more than a bridle-path, rougher than any cart road. Yet we held the breakneck pace steadily, save for the time it took to thread some steep defile to a stream crossing, or to scramble up its fellow on the opposite side; and when the dawn began to gray in the sky ahead, we were well out of the broken mountain region and into the opener forest of the hill country.

The sun was yet below the eastern horizon when we came to the fording of a larger stream than any we had crossed in the night. Its course was toward the sunrise, hence I took it for some tributary of the Catawba or the Broad.

"'Tis the Broad itself," said Ephraim Yeates, in answer to my asking; "and yit it ain't; leastwise, it ain't the one you know. 'Tis the one the Parley-voos claimed in the old war, and they call it the Frinch Broad."

"But that flows north and westward, if I remember aright," said I.

"So it do, so it do—in gineral. But hereabouts 'twill run all ways for Sunday, by spells."

"If this be the French Broad we are not yet out of the Tuckasege country, as I take it."

"Mighty nigh to it; nigh enough to make camp for a resting spell. I reckon ye're a-needing that same pretty toler'ble bad, ain't ye, little gal?" this last to Margery.

Weary as she was she smiled upon him brightly, as though he had been her grandsire and so free to name her how he pleased.

"I shall sleep well when we are out of danger. But you must not stop for me, or for Jeanne, till 'tis safe to do so."

"Safe? Lord love ye, child! 'safe' is a word beyond us yit, and will be till we sot ye down on your daddy's door-stone. But we'll make out to give ye a bite and sup and forty winks o' sleep immejitly, if not sooner, now."

So, on the farther side of the stream the hunter led the way aside, and when we were come to a small meadow glade with good grazing for the horses, he called a halt, lifted the women from their saddles and came to help me ease Dick down. The poor lad was stiff and sore, having no more use of his joints than if he were a bandaged mummy; but the fever delirium had passed and he was able to laugh feebly at the tree-limb contrivance rigged to hold him in the saddle.

"How did we come out of it, Jack?" he asked, when we had let him feel the comfort of lying flat upon his back on the soft sward.

"As you see. We are all here, and all in fair fettle, saving yourself. You're the heaviest loser."

He smiled, and his eyes languid with the fever sought out Margery, who would not come anigh whilst I was with him.

"That remains to be seen, Jack. If my dream comes true, I shall be the richest gainer."

"What did you dream?"

He beckoned me to bend lower over him. "I dreamed I was sore hurt, and that she was binding up my bruises and crying over me."

"'Twas no dream," I said; and with that I went to help Yeates make a bough shelter for the women while Uncanoola was grinding the maize for the breakfast cakes.

'Tis not my purpose to weary you with a day-by-day accounting for all that befell us on the way back to Mecklenburg. Suffice it to say that we ate and slept and rose to mount and ride again; this for five days and nights, during which Jennifer's fever grew upon him steadily.

At the close of the fifth day our night halt was in a deserted log cabin at the edge of an unfinished clearing in the heart of the forest. Here Richard's sickness anchored us, and for three full weeks the journey paused.

We nursed the lad as best we could for a fortnight, dosing him with stewings of such roots and herbs as the Catawba could find in the wood. Then, when we were at our wits' ends, and Yeates and I were casting about how we could compass the bringing of a doctor from the settlements, the fever took a turn for the better,—of its own accord, or for Uncanoola's physickings, we knew not which,—and at the end of the third week Dick was up and able to ride again, this time without the forked stick to hold him in the saddle.

After this we went on without mishap, and with no hardship greater than that of living solely upon the meat victual provided by the hunter's rifle; and you who know this plough-dressed region at this later day will wonder when I write it down that in all that long faring, or rather to the last day's stage of it, we saw never a face of any of our kind, or of the Catawba's.

You may be sure the month or more we spent thus in the heart of the wildwood was but a sorry time for me. While the excitement of the pursuit and rescue lasted, and later, when anxiety for Richard filled the hours of the long days and nights, I was held a little back from slipping into that pit of despair which I had digged for myself.

But when the strain was off and Dick was up and fit again, the misery of it all came back with added goadings. I had never dreamed how cutting sharp 'twould be to see these two together day by day; to see her loving, tender care of him, and to hear him babble of his love for her in his feverish vaporings. Yet all this I must endure, and with it a thing even harder. For, to make it worse, if worse could be, the shadow of complete estrangement had fallen between Margery and me. True to her word, given in that moment when I had besought her not to speak aloud for her own safety's sake, she had never opened her lips to me; and for aught she said or did I might have been a deaf-mute slave beneath her notice.

And as she drew away from me, she seemed to draw the closer to Richard Jennifer, nursing him alive when he was at his worst, and giving him all the womanly care and sympathy a sick man longs for. And later, when he was fit to ride again, she had him always at her side in the onward faring.

As I have said before, this was all as I would have it. Yet it made me sick in my soul's soul; and at times I must needs fall behind to rave it out in solitude, cursing the day that I was born, and that other more misfortunate day when I had reared the barrier impassable between these two.

What wonder, then, that, as we neared the fighting field of the great war, I grew more set upon seizing the first chance that might offer an honorable escape from all these heartburnings? 'Twas a weakness, if you choose; I set down here naught but the simple fact, which had by now gone as far beyond excusings as the underlying cause of it was beyond forgiveness.