waiting were outworn at length; and when the sun was dipping to the
mountains in the west I rose and washed me in the brook, and afterward
constrained myself to eat what Tomas had prepared for me.
The sunset glow was fading in the upper air, and underneath the canopy
of leaves the wood was darkening on to twilight, when I made ready to be
gone. Because I thought I might have need of it before the night was
done, I buckled on the heirloom sword; and telling Tomas and the other
blacks for their own safety to keep an alarm guard waking through the
night, I sallied forth upon my errand.
I've wished a thousand times, as I sit here before the fire and jot
these memories down in crabbed black on white, that I could conjure up
for you some speaking picture of this scene primeval in which the story
moves.
True, its hills and valleys are the same; the river keeps its course;
and in the west the mountain sky-line is unchanged. But here similitude
is at an end. You've hacked the virgin forest into shapes and fringes
where once it was an ample mantle seamed only by the rivers, and frayed
here and there at distant intervals by the settler's ax.
Beneath this mantle lay a world unlike the world you know. Plunged in
its furtive depths you felt the spell of nature's mystery upon you; the
mystery of the hoary wood, age-old, steeped in the nepenthe of the
centuries. In brightest summer day, which, in these forest aisles,
became a misty green translucence, the silence, the vastness, the
solitude laid each a finger on you, bidding you go softly all the way.
But in the twilight hour the real held still more aloof, and all the
shadows bristled with dim fantastic shapes to awe and affright the
alien-born.
I was not alien-born. From earliest childhood I had known and loved
these forest solitudes. Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the
twilight shadows awed me. Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk
so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half
out before the clearer vision came. There it was the figure of a man
gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with
me as if with sinister intent.
I pushed on faster, drawing the sword to keep me better company, though
inwardly I scoffed and jeered at this new twittering of the nerves. What
threat was there for me in silent shadows in the wood? The dogs I had to
fear were bred in British kennels, and there was never any lack of
clamor when they were beating up a cover.
Yet this persistent shadow clung upon my footsteps until from casting
furtive glances sidewise I came to holding it craftily in the tail of my
eye. 'Twas surely moving as I moved, and surely drawing nearer. I picked
a time and place, measured my distance, and darting suddenly aside, sent
home a thrust which should have pinned the phantom to a tree.
"Ugh! What for Captain Long-knife want kill the tree?"
The voice came from behind, and when I wheeled again my shadow was
become incarnated in flesh and blood; a stalwart Indian, naked to the
belt, standing so near he could have pricked me with his scalping knife.
It was God's mercy that by some swift intuition I knew him for the
friendly Catawba. It is an ill thing to take a frighted man unawares.
"Uncanoola?" said I.
He nodded. "Where 'bouts Captain Long-knife going?"
I told him briefly; whereat he shook his head.
"No find Captain Jennif' this way; find him _that_ way," pointing back
along the path.
"How does the chief know that? Has he seen him?" Though my long exile
had well-nigh cost me the trick of it, I made shift to drop into the
stately Indian hyperbole.
"Wah! Uncanoola has seen the Great Water: that make him have long
eyes--see heap things."
"Will the Catawba tell the friend whose life he saved what he has seen?"
"Uncanoola see heap things," he repeated. "See Captain Jennif' so"--he
threw himself flat upon the ground and pictured me a fugitive crawling
snake-like through the underwood. "Bime-by, come to river and find
canoe--jump in and paddle fas'; bime-by, 'gain, stop paddling and laugh
and shake fist this way, and say 'God-damn.'"
By this I knew that Jennifer had escaped; nay, more; had somehow learned
of my escape and was seeking me.
"Is that all the chief saw?" I asked.
"Ugh! See heap more things: see one thing white squaw no let him tell
Captain Long-knife. Maybe some time tell, anyhow."
"The white squaw?" said I. "Who is she?"
The Catawba laughed, an Indian laugh, silent and suppressed; a mere
shaking of the ribs.
"No can tell that, neither, too," he said. Then, with a swift dart aside
from the subject: "Captain Long-knife care much 'bout black dogs
yonder?"
I knew he meant the negroes at the hunting lodge.
"The white man cares for the black as a kind master should," I returned.
The Indian spat upon the ground in token of his hatred and contempt for
all the black skins in his fatherland. I never understood this bitter
race antipathy between the red and black, but 'tis a tale well written
out in many a bloody massacre of that earlier day.
"The wolves will kill all the black dogs and drink their blood before
the moon is awake. Uncanoola has spoken."
I sheathed my sword and turned to take the backward trace.
"Captain Long-knife will go and fight for his black dogs with wool on
their heads?" he queried.
"If need be," I asserted.
"Wah!" he ejaculated, and at the word was gone as if the earth had
swallowed him.
I lost no time in indecision. Since Jennifer was abroad, I had no
business at the plantations; and if Tomas and the other refugees were
like to come to harm, I could do no less than hasten back to warn or
help them.
So I retraced my steps, hurriedly, as the business urged; and saw no
more shadows in the ancient wood--in truth, had much ado to see the
single step ahead, so thickly did the darkness gather in those skyless
depths.
I was breasting the last low hill, was come so near that I could hear
the murmur of the river, when in the farthest hazy vista of the
tree-tops a softened glow appeared, changing the black to green and
then to red. 'Twas like the childish Africans, I said, to draw a secret
sentry line for safety's sake, and then to build a fire to advertise it
far and wide. Truly, the Catawba's wolves might find an easy--
A chattering scream of agony sent shrill and sharp upon the stillness of
the night halted me and broke the gibing comment in the midst. I stood
and listened. The cry rang out again; then I loosed the Andrea in its
scabbard and fell a-running, though the half-healed wound scanted me
sorely of the breath I wanted.
The cabin clearing, or rather the thinned-out grove which stood in lieu
thereof, was but a niggard acre hemmed in on every side, save that
toward the river, by the virgin forest. For cover there were holly
thickets here and there, and into one of these I plunged, creeping on
hands and knees to gain a hidden view-point.
The scene in the little clearing was one to brand itself in lasting
shapes upon the memory. A brush heap newly kindled gave out a dusky glow
flaring in waves of smoky red against the over-arching foliage. The open
space around the cabin was alive with half-naked savages running to and
fro; and in the gloom beyond the fire I saw a shadowy horseman backed by
others still more phantom-like.
There was no mystery about it. My enemy had come with sleuth-hound
Indians at his back to run me down. The savages were, no doubt, that
band of over-mountain Cherokees pledged by their chief to pilot the
powder convoy; and by their help the baronet had tracked me.
This was the first thought, caught at in passing; but when I came to
look again I saw what had been done. Sprawled on the ground before the
burning brush pile, his wrinkled face a hideous mask of suffering, with
the eyeballs starting from their sockets in the death-wrench, lay my
faithful Darius.
By what inhuman tortures they had made him point the way, or how or why
they slew him at the last, I know not, but I made sure it was his
death-scream that had halted me and set the stillness of the forest
alive with ghastly echoes.
At sight of the stiffening body of the faithful slave you may suppose my
blood ran cold and hot by turns, and that his blood cried out for
vengeance from the sod that soaked it up. With ten years more of youth
and less of age I might have tried to hew my way to Falconnet's stirrup,
and so to square accounts with him. But had I been a-mind to rush upon
the stage without my cue, another climax in the ghastly tragedy forbade
it.
This climax turned upon the capture of my horse-boy, Tomas. The other
blacks, it seemed, had made good their escape; but Tomas, lagging behind
through fear or foolishness, had given these copper-colored devils leave
to run him down and drag him back into the fire light, with yells of
savage triumph.
They flung him down upon his knees beside the captain's horse, and
though I caught but here and there a word above the frenzied yipping of
the Indians, it was plain the baronet was asking him of me.
I could not hear the black boy's gibbering answers, but that he would
not tell them what they wished to know--could not, indeed, since I had
left no word behind to track me by--was quickly evident. A cord was
found, and while I crouched behind the holly screen, aghast and helpless
as one against two-score or more, they looped him by the thumbs and
swung him up to dangle from a maple bough a musket's length or such a
matter before the cabin door.
He bore the torture patiently, as some poor dumb beast suffering at the
hand of man, and would not part his lips for all the captain's curses.
But this was only the merciful beginning. With yells of savage fury the
Indians carried brands to make a slow fire at his feet; and, lest that
should not be enough, a brace of them climbed to the roof, tore off the
splits for kindling, and set the cabin wall alight behind him.
You may thank God, my dears, that you are living in a kindlier age.
Mayhap the savage, now a-march toward the setting sun, is still as
pitiless as he was; but not in any corner of the world, I think, would
Anglo-Saxon men, wearing the king's or any other uniform, be witnesses
unmoved of such a devil's carnival of torment as this that made me
nauseate with horror.
As with the stretching of the cord the wretched black spun slowly round
and round before the growing blaze, his cries were something terrible to
hear. And when the fire light played upon his face it was a sight to
freeze the blood: the eyes shut tight against the shriveling heat, the
cracking lips drawn back, the black skin changing to a dry and sickly
brown. And ever and anon between the shrieks the parched lips shaped a
plea: "O Massa! Massa Cap'm! shoot po' nigga and let um die!"
This plea for cruel kindness cut me to the marrow of my bones; and
lacking means to save his life, I thought I might at least make shift to
try to put him out of misery.
The enemy's dispositions favored me. The savages, drunk with lust of
blood, leaped and danced around their victim. Falconnet sat his horse
apart beneath the maples, and with his bodyguard of troopers, was well
within the borderland of lurid shadow where the fire light mingled with
the night.
I crept away and made a swift detour to the right to come behind the
rearmost horseman of the troop. As his ill luck would have it, his
horse, affrighted at the firelit pandemonium, was in the act of wheeling
to run away. Being cumbered with a musket, the man made clumsy work of
handling his mount, and when the beast came down in a snorting tremble
to rear afresh at sight of me, the man flung away the musket and drew
his sword.
In cooler blood I might have given him his soldier's chance, but here
again it was another's life or mine. Even so, I might have fought him
fair, had he but held his tongue and fought in silence. But this he
would not, so I had to quiet him or have the others about my ears upon
his shoutings.
That done, I snatched the musket that had cost the man his life, and,
staying not to see what should befall, ran back to cover. In the
interval of weapon-getting the fire against the cabin wall had gnawed
its way from log to log and now was lapping with its yellow tongues
beneath the eaves. But lest the victim should not suffer long enough,
the Indians were at work in yelling frenzy, flogging the blaze with
green branches broken from the trees so that the fire itself should not
be merciful.
I waited till the slowly spinning figure of the black should turn and
make a mark I could not miss. The pause gave space for some swift
steadying of the nerves, but with the colder thought it also brought a
fierce and terrible temptation. The finger on the musket's trigger held
a life in pawn, and I might pick and choose and say what life I'd take.
I glanced aside at Falconnet. He was a fairer mark than my poor Tomas,
and by the laws of God and man had earned his death. The tortured slave
had little time to suffer at the worst, and with the bullet that would
give him surcease I could well avenge him. More than this; that bullet
planted in my enemy's heart would save my lady Margery harmless, leaving
me free to go to my own place and so to right the wrong that I had done.
All in the pivoting instant of the pause the musket swung slowly round
as of its own volition, and through its sights I saw the slashings, gold
on red, across the breasting of his captain's riding coat. One little
crooking of the trigger-finger and the lead had gone upon its errand.
But at the balancing instant that piteous cry was lifted once again: "O
Massa! Massa Cap'm! God 'a' mussy--shoot po' nigga and let 'um die!"
I did as any other man would do, as you have guessed. The great king's
musket swept another arc, and roared and belched and spat its messenger
of death; and my poor Tomas had the boon he prayed for.
And then, as if the musket flash and roar had been a lodestone and these
fierce Cherokees so many bits of steel to cluster thick upon it, I was
surrounded in the twinkling of an eye, and whizzing hatchets and rifle
bullets whining sibilant were but an earnest of the fate I had invited.
XV
IN WHICH A HATCHET SINGS A MAN TO SLEEP
In such a coil as this I'd looped about me there was nothing for it, as
it seemed, but to draw the steel and die as a soldier should. So I broke
cover on the forest side of the holly thicket with a yell as fierce as
theirs, and picked a tree to set my back against, and ran for it.
I never reached the tree. In mid career, when all the Cherokee wolf pack
was bursting through the holly tangle at my heels, two men, a white man
and an Indian, ran in ahead, as I supposed to cut me off. Just then the
dry roof of the hunting lodge roared aflame, reddening the forest far
and near. The light was at my back and on the faces of the two who ran
to meet me. A great sob swelled in my throat and choked me, but I ran
the faster. For these were my dear lad and the friendly Catawba,
charging gallantly to cover my retreat.
It was a ready help in time of need. They ran in bravely, the chief
ahead, twirling his tomahawk for the throw, with Dick a pace to right
and rear, his two great pistols brandished and the grandsire of all the
broadswords dangling by a thong at his wrist.
"Follow the chief!" he shouted in passing; and at the word the Catawba
stopped short, sent his hatchet whistling into the yapping pack behind
me, and swerved to run aside and point the way for me.
Left to myself, I hope I should have had the grace to stand with
Jennifer. But at the turning point of indecision the quick-witted Indian
read my thought, and snatching the sword from my hand, gave me no choice
but to follow him.
So I ran with him; but as I fled I looked behind and saw a sight to put
the ancient hero tales to the blush. One man against two-score my brave
Dick stood, while through the underwood the mounted soldiery came to
make the odds still greater.
He never flinched for all the hurtling missiles sent on ahead to cut him
down, nor gave a glance aside to where the horsemen were deploying to
surround him. As I looked, the two great pistols belched in the very
faces of the nearest Cherokees; and in the momentary check the firearms
made, the basket-hilted claymore went to work, rising and falling like a
weaver's beam.
I saw no more; but some heart-bursting minutes later, when Jennifer came
racing on behind to share the flight his heroic stand had made a
possibility, the swelling sob choked me once again; and when I thought
of what this his rescue of me meant to him, I could have blubbered like
a boy.
But there was little time or space to give remorse an inning. The
Cherokees, checked but for the moment, were storming hotly at our heels.
And as we ran I heard the shouted command of Falconnet to his mounted
men: "A rescue! Right oblique, and head them in the road! Gallop, you
devils!"
We ran in Indian file, I at the chief's heels and Jennifer at mine. I
followed the Catawba blindly; and being as yet little better than half a
man in breath and muscle, was well-nigh spent before we crashed down
through a tangled briar thicket into the river road.
We were in time, but with no fraction of a minute to spare. We could
hear the _pad-pad-pad_ of the light-footed runners close upon us,
following now by the noise we made; and on our left the air was
trembling to the thunder of the mounted men coming at a break-neck
gallop down the road.
"Thank God!" says Richard, with a quick eyeshot to right and left in the
lesser gloom of the open. "I was afeard even the chief might miss the
place in the dark. Down the bank to the river!--quick, man, and
cautious! If they smell us out now, we're no better than buzzard-meat!"
And when we reached the water's edge: "You taught me how to paddle a
pirogue, Jack; I hope you haven't lost the knack of it yourself."
"No," said I; and the three of us slid the hollowed log into the stream.
We were afloat in shortest order, holding the canoe against the current
by clinging to the overhanging trees that fringed the bank; yet with
paddles poised for a second dash for freedom should the need arise. I
should have dipped forthwith to save the precious minutes, but Jennifer
stayed me.
"Hist!" he whispered. "Hold steady and listen. They can not see us from
above; mayhap we've thrown them off the scent."
I thought it most unlikely; but his guess was right and mine was wrong.
Though any of these savages could lift a trail in daylight, following it
at top speed like a trained blood-hound, yet now the darkness baffled
them.
So there was some running to and fro in the road above our heads, and
then the troopers galloped down. Followed hastily a labored confab
through the linguister, broken in the midst by a fury of hot oaths from
Falconnet; and then the chase swept on toward the plantations, and we
were left to make their losing of us sure by whatsoever means we chose.
We paddled slowly up stream in silence, keeping well within the blacker
shadow of the tree fringe. When we came opposite the glowing ruins of
the hunting lodge, Jennifer backed upon his paddle.
"You'll go ashore?" said he.
I said I would, adding: "They have slaughtered poor old Darius, and I am
loath to leave his bones for the buzzards to pick."
He made no comment other than to swear in sympathy. When the pirogue
grounded, the Indian was out like a cat, to vanish phantom-wise among
the trees. I followed in some clumsier fashion, leaving Jennifer to
keep the canoe; but half way up the hill he joined me, and would not
turn back for all my urging. "No; hang me if I'll let you out of
eye-grip again," was all he would say; and so we went together, and were
together at the seeing of what the glowing ember-heap would show us.
Poor Tomas had his sepulture already. His cord had burned in two and let
him down so close beside the cabin wall that all the blazing debris from
the overhanging eaves had made his funeral pile. Darius lay as I had
last seen him; and him we buried in the maize clearing at the back, with
the ember glow for funeral lights.
It was a chanceful thing to do. Since the Cherokees had left their dead
and wounded, and Falconnet the body of his trooper who had yielded me
the musket, there was small doubt they would return. Yet we had time to
dig a shallow grave for my old henchman; to dig and fill it up again;
and afterward to make a circuit round the burning pile to reach the
river side once more.
When we had launched the canoe, and were afloat and ready for the start,
the Catawba was still missing.
"Where is the chief, think you?" I asked; but Dick's answer, if, indeed,
he gave me any, was lost in a chorus of ear splitting yells rending the
silence of the night like demon cries. Then a single ululation, long
drawn and fair blood chilling, answered back, and Jennifer swept the
pirogue stern to strand with a quick paddle stroke.
"That last was Uncanoola's war cry; they've doubled back in time to
catch him at it!" he cried. "Stand by to drive her when I give the word!
Here he comes!"
Down the sloping hillside, looking, in the red glow of the ember heap,
more like a flying demon than a man, came the Catawba, one hand gripping
the scalping-knife, the other flung aloft to flaunt his terrible
trophies in sight of his pursuers. They were so close upon him that
waiting promised death for all of us; so Jennifer dipped again to send
the canoe a broad jump from the bank.
"Ready!" he cried. "He'll take the water like a fish, and we can pick
him up afterward--_Now_!"
I heard the clean-cut dive of the Indian, and struck the paddle deep to
balance Jennifer's stroke. But as I bent to put my back into it, some
flying missile caught me fair behind the ear, and but for Jennifer's
quick wit I should have swamped the crazy shallop. In a flash he jerked
me flat between his knees and sent the pirogue with a mighty thrust
beyond the zone of fire light.
At that, though all the sense was beaten out of me, I was alive enough
to hear the savage yells of disappointed rage behind us; these and the
spitting crackle of a dozen rifles fired at random in the darkness. But
afterward all sounds, save the rhythmic dip and drip of Jennifer's
paddle, faded on the sense of hearing till, as it would seem, this
gentle monody of dipping blade and tinkling drops became a crooning
lullaby to blot out all the years that lay between, and make me once
again a little child sinking asleep in my young mother's arms.
XVI
HOW JENNIFER THREW A MAIN WITH DEATH
'Tis a sure mark of healthful sleep that it never makes account of time.
No odds how long the night, 'tis but a moment from the lapse of
consciousness to its recovery in the morning. But this deep sleep that
crept upon me as I lay in the pirogue, listening to the tinkling drip
from Jennifer's paddle, was not of healthful weariness; and when I came
awake from it there was a dim and troubled vista of vague and broken
dreams to measure off the longest night I could ever remember.
The place of this awakening was a burrow in the earth. My bed of
bearskins over fragrant pine-tufts was spread upon the ground, and by
the flickering light of a handful of fire I could see the earth walls of
the burrow, which were worn smooth as if the place had been the
well-used den of some wild creature. But overhead there was the mark of
human occupancy, since the earth-arch was sooted and blackened with the
reek of many fires.
When I stirred there was another stir beyond the handful of fire, and
Jennifer came to kneel beside me, taking my hand and chafing it as a
tender-hearted woman might, and asking if I knew him.
"Know you? Why should I not?" I said, wondering why the words took so
many breaths between.
"O Jack!" was all I had in answer; but when he had found a tongue to
babble out his joy, I learned the why and wherefore. Once more grim
death had reached for me, lying await in the twirled tomahawk that set
me dreaming of my mother's lap and lullaby. For a week I had lain here
upon the bed of pine-tufts, poised upon the brink of the death pit with
only my dear lad to hold and draw me back.
"A week?" I queried, when he had named the interval. "And you have been
here all the time?"
"I've never left you, save to forage for the pot," he admitted. "I dared
not leave you, Jack."
"But where are we?" I would ask.
"In a den on the river's edge, a mile or more above your sacked cabin.
'Tis some dodge-hole hollowed out by the Catawbas long ago and shared
since by them and the bears, judging from the stinking reek of it.
Uncanoola steered me hither the night of the raid."
"Then the chief came off safely?" I said, falling into a dumb and
impotent rage that the saying of two words should scant me so of
strength to say a third.