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.