Gilbert Stair cursed him roundly for an impertinent jackanapes, and then gave him his answer.
""Tis none of your business, d.i.c.kie 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?" d.i.c.k 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?"
"G.o.d 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 G.o.d"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 compa.s.s, 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. .h.i.ther margin was a bit of gra.s.sy intervale big enough for a horse to roll upon. Though it was sadly out of season, the carca.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 racc.o.o.n-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 ta.s.selings 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 a.r.s.enal 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, in his soft guttural. "No want kill Captain Jennif", hey?"