fierce a fool as I. 'Twas his good common sense that saved us both, I
think, for when the savage rival madness was at its height he turned
away, swearing we were the very pick and choice of a world of asses to
stand thus feeling for each other's throats when, mayhap, the lady
needed both of us.
This brought me to my senses at a gallop, as you would guess; to them
and to the lighting of the conscience fire within whereon to grill the
wicked heart that but now had thirsted for a brother's blood.
"Now God have mercy on us both!" I groaned. "Forgive me, Dick, if you
can; I was as mad as any Bedlamite. If I have any claim on her, 'tis not
of her good will, you may be sure. You have the baronet to fear--not
me."
He shook his head and pointed to the parchment--to the line in French.
"Francis Falconnet was under the same roof with her--or at least in easy
call--when she wrote that, Jack. He is no longer my rival--nor yours."
His word set me thinking, and I would fall to picking out the strands
that jealous wrath had woven for me into the web of happenings. Setting
aside the story brought by Ephraim Yeates, there was no certain proof
that she had ever favored the Englishman; nay, more, till I had come to
be madly jealous of Falconnet, I had made sure that Jennifer was the
favored one.
At this, as one sees a landscape struck out clear and vivid by the
lightning's flash, I saw the true meaning of the word the hunter had
brought--saw it and went upon my knees to grope blindly for the sword I
had let fall when Dick had found the arrow.
"What is it, Jack?" he asked, gently.
"My sword!" I gasped. "We should have been half-way there by this.
Yeates was misled. 'Tis Falconnet she fears. She was at bay--hark you,
at bay and fair desperate. That word of hers to the baronet was her poor
pitiful defiance built on her trust in us, and we have lain here--"
He found the sword and thrust it into my hand, crying:
"Come on! You can strew the dust and ashes on me later. You said you
loved her the better, and I do believe it now, Jack! You trusted her, as
I did not. We'll fight as one man to cut her out of this coil, whatever
it may be; and after that is done I'll make my bow and leave you a fair
field."
"Nay, nay; that you shall not, Dick," I began; but he was half-way
through the narrow passage to the open, trailing the ancient broadsword
and the bearskin from his bed; and I was fain to follow quickly, leaving
the protest all unfinished.
XVIII
IN WHICH WE HEAR NEWS FROM THE SOUTH
As near as might be guessed, it wanted yet an hour or two of daybreak
when we made a landing within the boundaries of Appleby Hundred, and
beached and hid the pirogue in the bushes.
Of the down-stream flitting through the small hours of the warm
midsummer night there is no sharp-etched picture on the memory page. As
I recall it, no spoken word of Jennifer's or mine came in to break the
rhythm of the hasting voyage. Our paddles rose and fell, dipping and
sweeping in unison as if we two, kneeling in bow and stern, were
separate halves of some relentless mechanism driven by a single impulse.
Overhead the starlit dome circled solemnly to the right or left to match
the windings of the stream. On each hand the tree-fringed shores sped
backward in the gloom; and beneath the light shell of poplar wood that
barely kissed the ripples in passing, the river lapped and gurgled,
chuckling weirdly at the paddle plungings, and swirling aft in the
longer reaches to point at us down the lengthening wake with a wavering
finger silver-tipped in the wan starlight.
With the canoe safely hidden at the landing place, which was some
little distance from that oak grove where I had twice kept tryst with
death, we set out for the manor house, skulking Indian fashion through
the wood; and, when we reached the in-fields, looking momently to come
upon a sentry.
Thinking the approaches from the road and river would be better guarded
than that from the wood, we skirted a widespread thicket tangle, spared
by my father twenty years before to be a grouse and pheasant cover, and
fetching a compass of half a mile or more across the maize fields, came
in among the oaks and hickories of the manor grounds.
Still there was no sight nor sound of any enemy; no light of candles at
the house, or of camp-fires beneath the trees.
A little way within the grove, where the interlacing tree-tops made the
darkness like Egyptian night, Jennifer went on all fours to feel around
as if in search of something on the sward. Whereat I called softly to
know what he would be at.
He rose, muttering, half as to himself: "I thought I'd never be so far
out of reckoning." Then to me: "A few hours since, the Cherokees were
encamped just here. You are standing in the ashes of their fire."
"So?" said I. "Then they have gone?"
"Gone from this safely enough, to be sure. They have been gone some
hours; the cinders are cold and dew wet."
"So much the better," I would say, thinking only that now there would
be the fewer enemies to fight.
He clipt my arm suddenly, putting the value of an oath into his gripping
of it.
"Come awake, man; this is no time to be a-daze!" His whisper was a sharp
behest, with a shake of the gripped arm for emphasis. "If the Indians
are gone, it means that the powder train has come and gone, too."
"Well?" said I.
I was still thinking, with less than a clod's wit, that this would send
the baronet captain about his master's business, and so Margery would
have surcease of him for a time, at least. But Jennifer fetched me awake
with another whip-lash word or two.
"Jack! has the night's work gone to your head? If Falconnet has got his
marching orders you may be sure he's tried by hook or crook to play
'safe bind, safe find,' with Madge. By heaven! 'twas that she was afeard
of, and we are here too late! Come on!"
With that he faced about and ran; and forgetting to loose his grip on my
arm, took me with him till I broke away to have my sword hand free. So
running, we came presently to the open space before the house, and,
truly, it was well for us that the place was clean deserted; for by this
we had both forgot the very name of prudence.
Jennifer outran me to the door by half a length, and fell to hammering
fiercely on the panel with the pommel of his broadsword.
"Open! Mr. Stair; open!" he shouted, between the batterings; but it was
five full minutes before the fan-light overhead began to show some faint
glimmerings of a candle coming from the rooms beyond.
Richard rested at that, and in the pause a thin voice shrilled from
within.
"Be off, you runagates! Off, I say! or I fire upon ye through the door!"
Giving no heed to the threat, Dick set up his clamor again, calling out
his name, and bidding the old man open to a friend. In some notching of
the hubbub I heard the unmistakable click of a gun-flint on steel. There
was barely time to trip my reckless batterer and to fall flat with him
on the door-stone when a gun went off within, and a handful of slugs,
breaching the oaken panel at the height of a man's middle, went
screeching over us.
Before I knew what he would be at, Richard was up with an oath, backing
off to hurl himself, shoulder on, against the door. It gave with a
splintering crash, letting him in headlong. I followed less hastily. It
was as black as a setter's mouth within, the gun fire having snuffed the
old man's candle out. But we had flint and steel and tinder-box, and
when the punk was alight, Jennifer found the candle under foot and gave
it me. It took fire with a fizzing like a rocket fuse, and was well
blackened with gunpowder. When the flint had failed to bring the firing
spark, the old man had set his piece off with the candle flame.
We found him in the nook made by the turn of the stair, flung thither,
as it seemed, by the recoil of the great bell-mouthed blunderbuss which
he was still clutching. The fall had partly stunned him, but he was
alive enough to protest feebly that he would take a dozen oaths upon his
loyalty to the cause; that he had mistook us for some thieving marauders
of the other side; craftily leaving cause and party without a name till
he should have his cue from us.
Whereupon Richard loosed his neckcloth to give him better breathing
space, and bidding me see if the revelers had left a heel-tap of wine in
any bottle nearer than the wine cellar, lifted the old man and propped
him in the corner of the high-backed hall settle.
The wine quest led me to the banqueting-room. Here disorder reigned
supreme. The table stood as the roisterers had left it; the very wreck
and litter of a bacchanalian feast. Bottles, some with the necks struck
off, were scattered all about, and the floor was stained and sticky with
spilt wine and well sanded with shattered glass.
I found a remnant draining in one of the broken bottles, and a cup to
pour it in; and with this salvage from the wreck returned to Jennifer
and his charge. The old man had come to some better sensing of
things,--he had been vastly more frightened than hurt, as I
suspected,--and to Richard's eager questionings was able to give some
feebly querulous replies.
"Yes, they're gone--all gone, curse 'em; and they've taken every plack
and bawbee they could lay their thieving hands upon," he mumbled. "'Tis
like the dogs; to stay on here and eat and drink me out of house and
home, and then to scurry off when I'm most like to need protection."
"But Madge?" says Richard. "Is she safe in bed?"
"She's a jade!" was all the answer he got. Then the old man sat up and
peered around the end of the settle to where I stood, cup and bottle in
hand. "'Tis a Christian thought," he quavered. "Give me a sup of the
wine, man."
I served him and had a Scottish blessing for my wastefulness, because,
forsooth, the broken bottle spilt a thimbleful in the pouring. I saw he
did not recognize me, and was well enough content to let it rest thus.
Richard suffered him to drink in peace, but when the cup was empty he
renewed his asking for Margery. At this the master of the house,
heartened somewhat by my father's good madeira, made shift to get upon
his feet in some tremulous fashion.
"Madge, d'ye say? She's gone; gone where neither you nor that dour-faced
deevil that befooled us all will find her soon, I promise you, Dickie
Jennifer!" he snapped; and I gave them my back and stumbled blindly to
the door, making sure his next word would tell my poor wronged lad all
that he should have learned from never any other lips but mine own. But
Richard himself parried the impending stroke of truth, saying:
"So she is safe and well, Mr. Stair, 'tis all I ask to know."
"She is safe enough; safer by far than you are at this minute, my young
cock-a-hoop rebel, now that the king--God save him!--has his own again."
I turned quickly on the broad door-stone to look within. Out of doors
the early August dawn was graying mistily overhead, but in the house the
sputtering tallow dip still struggled feebly with the gloom. They stood
facing each other, these two, my handsome lad, the pick and choice of a
comely race, looking, for all his toils and vigils, fresh and fit; and
the old man in his woolen dressing-gown, his wig awry, and his lean face
yellow in the candle-light.
"How is that you say, Mr. Stair?" says Dick. "The king--but that is only
the old Tory cry. There will never be a king again this side of the
water."
The old man reached out and hooked a lean finger in the lad's
buttonhole. "Say you so, Richard Jennifer? Then you will never have
heard the glorious news?" This with a leer that might have been of
triumph or the mere whetting of gossip eagerness--I could not tell.
"No," says Richard, with much indifference.
"Hear it, then. 'Twas at Camden, four days since. They came together in
the murk of the Wednesday morning, my Lord Cornwallis and that poor fool
Gates. De Kalb is dead; your blethering Irishman, Rutherford, is
captured; and your rag-tag rebel army is scattered to the four winds.
And that's not all. On the Friday, Colonel Tarleton came up with Sumter
at Fishing Creek and caught him napping. Whereupon, Charlie McDowell and
the over-mountain men, seeing all was lost, broke their camp on the
Broad and took to their heels, every man jack of them for himself. So ye
see, Dickie Jennifer, there's never a cursed corporal's guard left in
either Carolina to stand in the king's way."
He rattled all this off glibly, like a child repeating some lesson got
by heart; but when I would have found a grain of comfort in the hope
that it was a farrago of Falconnet's lies, Jennifer made the truth
appear in answer to a curt question.
"'Tis beyond doubt?--all this, Mr. Stair?"
The old loyalist--loyalist now, if never certainly before--sat down on
the settle and laughed; a dry wizened cackle of a laugh that sounded
like the crumpling of new parchment.
"You'd best be off, light foot and tight foot, Master Richard, lest you
learn shrewdly for yourself. 'Tis in everybody's mouth by this. There
were some five-and-forty of the king's friends come together here no
longer ago than yestere'en to drink his Majesty's health, and eh, man!
but it will cost me a pretty penny! Will that satisfy ye?"
"Yes," said Jennifer, thinking, mayhap, as I did, that nothing short of
gospel-true news would have sufficed to unlock this poor old miser's
wine cellar.
"Well, then; you'd best be off while you may; d'ye hear? I bear ye no
ill-will, Richard Jennifer; and if Mr. Tarleton lays hold of you, you'll
hang higher than Haman for evading your parole, I promise you. We'll say
naught about this rape of the door-lock, though 'tis actionable, sir,
and I'll warn you the law would make you smart finely for it. But we'll
enter a _nolle prosequi_ on that till you're amnestied and back, then
you can pay me the damage of the broken lock and we'll cry quits."
At this my straightforward Richard snorted in wrathful derision. However
much he loved the daughter, 'twas clear he had small regard for the
father.
"Seeing we came to do you a service, Mr. Stair, I think we may set the
blunderbuss and the handful of slugs over against the smashed door. And
that fetches me back to our errand here. You say Madge is safe. Does
that mean that you have spirited her away since last night?"
"Dinna fash yoursel' about Madge, Richard Jennifer. She's meat for your
betters, sir!" rasped the old man, lapsing into the mother tongue, as he
did now and then in fear or anger.
"Still I would know what you mean when you say she is safe," says
Richard, whose determination to crack a nut was always proportioned to
the hardness of the shell.
Gilbert Stair cursed him roundly for an impertinent jackanapes, and then
gave him his answer.
"'Tis none of your business, Dickie Jennifer, but you may know and be
hanged to you! She rode home with the Witherbys last night after the
rout, and will be by this safe away in t'other Carolina where your
cursed Whiggeries darena lift head or hand."
"Of her own free will?" Dick persisted.
"Damme! yes; bag, baggage, serving wench and all. Now will you be off
about your business before some spying rascal lays an information
against me for harboring you?"
Richard joined me on the door-stone. The dawn was in its twilight now,
and the great trees on the lawn were taking gray and ghostly shapes in
the dim perspective.
"You heard what he had to say?" said he.
I nodded.
"It seems we have missed our cue on all sides," he went on, not without
bitterness. "I would we might have had a chance to fire a shot or two
before the ship went down."
"At Camden, you mean? That's but the beginning; the real battles are all
to be fought yet, I should say."
He shook his head despondently. "You are a newcomer, Jack, and you know
not how near outworn the country is. Gilbert Stair has the right of it
when he says there will be nothing to stop the redcoats now."
I called to mind the resolute little handful under Captain Abram Forney,
one of many such, he had told me, and would not yield the point.
"There will be plenty of fighting yet, and we must go to bear a hand
where it is needed most," said I. "Where will that be, think you? At
Charlotte?"
He looked at me reproachfully.
"This time 'tis you who are the laggard in love, John Ireton. Will you
go and leave Mistress Margery wanting an answer to her poor little cry
for help?"
I shrugged. "What would you? Has she not taken her affair into her own
hands?"
"God knows how much or little she has had to say about it," said he.
"But I mean to know, too, before I put my name on any company roll." We
were among the trees by this, moving off for safety's sake, since the
day was coming; and he broke off short to wheel and face me as one who
would throttle a growling cur before it has a chance to bite. "We know
the worst of each other now, Jack, and we must stand to our compact. Let
us see her safe beyond peradventure of a doubt; then I'm with you to
fight the redcoats single-handed, if you like. I know what you will
say--that the country calls us now more than ever; but there must needs
be some little rallying interval after all this disaster, and--"
"Have done, Richard," said I. "Set the pace and mayhap I can keep step
with you. What do you propose?"
"This; that we go to Witherby Hall and get speech with Mistress Madge,
if so be--"
"Stay a moment; who are these Witherbys?"
"A dyed-in-the-wool Tory family seated some ten miles across the line in
York district. True, 'tis a rank Tory hotbed over there, and we shall
run some risk."
"Never name risk to me if you love me, Richard Jennifer!" I broke in.
"What is your plan?"
His answer was prompt and to the point. "To press on afoot through the
forest till we come to the York settlement; then to borrow a pair of
Tory horses and ride like gentlemen. Are you game for it?"
I hesitated. "I see no great risk in all this, and whatever the hazard,
'tis less for one than for two. You'd best go alone, Richard."
He saw my meaning; that I would stand aside and let him be her succor if
she needed help. But he would not have it so.
"No," he said, doggedly. "We'll go together, and she shall choose
between us for a champion, if she is in the humor to honor either of us.
That is what 'twill come to in the end; and I warn you fairly, John
Ireton, I shall neither give nor take advantage in this strife. I said
last night that I would stand aside, but that I can not--not till she
herself says the killing word with her own lips."
"And that word will be--?"
"That she loves another man. Come; let us be at it; we should be well
out of this before the plantation people are astir."
XIX
HOW A STUMBLING HORSE BROUGHT TIDINGS
Having a definite thing to do, we set about it forthwith, taking to the
fields and making a wide circuit around the manor house and the quarters
where the blacks were already stirring, to come out to the river and so
to cross in our canoe.
The morning, soft and warm enough, threatened now to break the fair
weather promise of the starlit night. Away in the east a heavy cloud
bank curtained off the sunrise, and in the fields the few dry maize
blades left by the partizan harriers were whispering to the gusts.
In the great forest all was yet dim and shadowy, and silent as the grave
but for the whispering murmur of the rising wind in the higher
tree-tops; a sound so like the babbling of brooks as most cunningly to
deceive the ear and make it set the eye at work to look for water where
there was none.
Not to take a certain hazard for the sake of better speed, we shunned
the road, and for the first hour or so were not greatly hindered by
keeping to the forest paths. In vast areas this virgin wood was free of
undergrowth, open and park-like as a well-kept grove. Fireside tradition
on the border tells how the Indians kept the forest clear by yearly
burnings of the smaller growth; this for the better hunting of the deer.
I vouch, not for the truth of this accounting for the fact, but for the
fact itself. For endless miles between the watercourses these park-like
stretches covered hill and dale; a vast mysterious temple of God's own
building, its naves and choirs and transepts columned by the countless
trees, with all their leafy crowns to interlace and form the groined
arches overhead.
Through these pillared aisles we tramped abreast, shunning the road, as
I have said, yet holding it parallel with our course where its direction
served. In the open vistas we had frequent glimpses of it, winding, at
feud with all the points of the compass, among the trees. But farther on
we came into the lower land of a creek bottom, and here a thickset
undergrowth robbed us of any view and made the march a toilsome struggle
with the bushes.
It was in the densest of this underwood, when we could hear the purring
of the stream ahead, that Jennifer stopped suddenly and began to sniff
the air.
"Smoke," he said, briefly, in answer to my query. "A camp-fire, with
meat abroil. Never tell me you can't smell it."
I said I could not--did not, at all events.
"Then you are not as sharp set for breakfast as I am. Call up your
woodcraft and we'll stalk it." And, suiting the action to the word, he
dropped noiselessly on hands and knees to inch his way cautiously out of
the thicket.
I followed at his heels, marveling at his skill in threading the maze
with never a snapped twig to betray him. For though I have called him a
youthling, he came of great, square-shouldered English stock, and was
well upon fourteen stone for weight. Yet upon occasion, as now, he could
be as lithe and cat-like as an Indian, stealthy in approach and
tiger-strong to spring.
In due time our creeping progress brought us out of the thicket on the
brink of the higher creek bank. Just here the stream ran in a shallow
ravine with shelving banks of clay, and on its hither margin was a bit
of grassy intervale big enough for a horse to roll upon. Though it was
sadly out of season, the carcass of a deer, fresh killed, hung upon a
branch of the nearest tree, with a rifle leaning against the trunk as if
to guard it. In the middle of the bit of sward a tiny camp-fire burned;
and at the fire, squatting with their backs to us and each toasting a
cut of the deer's meat on a forked stick, were two men.
One of these men would pass by courtesy as a white. His hunting-shirt
and leggings were of deer skin, well grimed and greasy, with leather
fringes at the seams of leg and sleeve. For all the summer heat, he wore
a cap fashioned of raccoon-skin with the fur on; and for this great cap
his iron-gray hair, matted and unkempt, served as a fringe to keep the
other tasselings in countenance. The hunting-shirt was belted at the
waist, and in the belt was thrust a sheathless knife huge enough to
serve a butcher's purpose. From two leather thongs crossed upon his
shoulders hung the powder-horn and bullet-pouch; and these, with the
knife and rifle, summed up his accoutrements.
The other was a red man, and his attire was simpler. Like all our
southern Indians, he went naked to the waist; but the savage's love of
ornament showed forth in the fringe of colored porcupine quills on his
leggings and in his raven hair bestuck with feathers. For arms he had an
arsenal in his belt; two great pistols, a tomahawk, and the
scalping-knife, this last smaller than the white man's carving tool, but
far more vicious looking.
For a moment or two we crouched irresolute on the brink of the ravine,
neither of us recognizing the two below. Then my young rashling must
needs let out a yell.
"Now, by all that's lucky!" he cried, and would have leaped to his feet.
But at the instant the earth-edge gave way under him, and he was sent
tumbling with the small landslide of clay down upon the twain at the
fire.
It went within a trembling hair's-breadth of a tragedy. The two at the
fire sprang up as one man; and the bound that set the hunter afoot
brought his long rifle to his shoulder. But that the Indian was the
quicker, Richard's life would have paid the penalty of his slip, I
think. At the trigger-pulling instant the Catawba thrust the thick of
his hand between stone and steel, and the flint bit, harmless for
Jennifer, into the palm of the Indian.
"Wah!" he ejaculated, in his soft guttural. "No want kill Captain
Jennif', hey?"
Ephraim Yeates lowered his weapon and released the pinched hand held
fast by the gun-flint.
"Well, I'm daddled, fair and square, Cap'n Dick!" he declared. "Jest one
more shake of a dead lamb's tail, and I'd 'a' had ye on my mind, sartain
sure! I allowed ye knowed better than to come whammling down that-away
behint a man whilst he's a-cooking his ven'son."
Dick laughed and called to me to follow as I could. And his answer to
the old borderer was no answer at all.