'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.
"right as a trivet—scalps and all," laughed jennifer. "he'll be the envy of every warrior in the tribe when he vaunts himself at the catawbas' council fire."
i let it rest a while at that, casting about for words to shape a hungrier question.
"have you no news?" i asked, at length.
"little or none," he answered shortly.
"but you have had some word—some news—from appleby hundred?" i stammered feebly.
"nothing you'd care to hear," he rejoined, evasively, i thought. "'tis as you left it, save that tarleton whipped away to the south again as suddenly as he came, and our cursing baronet has made the manor house his headquarters in fact, lodging himself and all his troop on mr. stair. from his lying quiet and keeping the cherokees in tow, there will be some deviltry afoot, i'll warrant."
i knew that falconnet was waiting for the powder cargo, but another matter crowded this aside.
"but—but margery?" i queried, on sharpest tenter-hooks to know how much or little he had heard.
i thought his brow darkened at the question, but mayhap it was only a shadow cast by the flickering fire. at any rate, he laughed hardily.
"she is well—and well content, i dare swear. 'twas only yesterday i saw her taking the air on the river road, with falconnet for an escort. you told me once he had a sure hand with the women and it made me mad; but, truly, i have come to think you drew it mild, jack."
now though i could ply a decent ready blade, or keep a firing line from lurching at a pinch, i had not learned to put a snaffle on a blundering tongue, as i have said before.
"damn him as you please, dick, and he'll warrant it. but you must not judge the lady over harshly, nor always by appearances. she may have flouted you as a boyish lover, and yet i think—"
i stopped in sheer bewilderment, shot through and through with keenest agonies of remorseful recollection. for at the moment i had clean forgot the gulf impassable i had set between these two. so i would have lapsed into shamed silence, but jennifer would not suffer it.
"well, what is it that you think?" he demanded.
"i think—nay, i may say i know that she thinks well of you, dick," i blundered on, seeing no way to put him off.
he gripped my hand, and in his eyes there was the light of the old love reawakening.
"don't lift me up to fling me down again, jack! how can you know what she thinks of me?" he broke in, eagerly.
i should have told him then all there was to tell. he had been thrice my savior, and his heart was soft and malleable on the side of friendship. i knew it—knew that the pregnant moment for full confession had arrived; and yet i could not force my tongue to shape the words. indeed, i saw more clearly than before that never any word of mine could make him understand that i was not a faithless traitor in intention. so i paltered with the truth, like any wretched coward of them all.
"you forget that i have come to know her well," i said. "i was a month or more under the same roof with her, and in that time she told me many things."
now, this witless speech was no better than a whip to flog him on.
"what things?" he questioned, promptly.
"oh, many things. she spoke often of you."
"what did she say of me, jack? tell me what she said," he begged. "it can make no difference now; she is less than nothing to me—nay,'tis even worse than that, since she would play delilah if she could. but oh, jack, i love her!—i should love her if i stood on the gallows and she stood by to spring the drop and turn me off!"
truly, if the lash of remorse had lacked its keenest thong, this passionate outburst of his would have added it. none the less, i must needs be weaker than water and fall back another step and put him off.
"another time, richard. i am strangely unnerved and dizzy-headed now. by and by, when i am stronger, i will tell you all."
taking a reproach where none was meant, he sprang up with a self-aimed malison upon his lack of care for me, stirred the fire alive and brewed me a most delicious-smelling cup of broth. and afterward, when i had drunk the broth with some small beckonings of returning appetite, he spread his coat to screen me from the fire light and would have driven me to sleep again.
"at any rate, you shall not talk," he promised. "if you are wakeful i will talk to you and tell you what little i have gleaned about the fighting."
his news was chiefly a later repetition of father matthieu's and captain abram forney's, but there was this to add: the congress had appointed the englishman, horatio gates, chief of the army in the south, and this new leader was on his way to take command.
de kalb, with the maryland and delaware lines and colonel armand's legion, was encamped on deep river, waiting for the newly-appointed general; and caswell and griffith rutherford, with the militia, were already pressing forward to some handgrips with my lord cornwallis in the south.
nearer at hand, the partizan war-fire flamed afresh wherever a tory company met a patriot, and there were wicked doings, more like savage massacres than fair-fought battles of the soldier sort.
when he had made an end of his small war budget, i set him on to tell me how he came to be at hand to help me so in the nick of time on the night of the cabin sack.
"'twas partly chance," he said. "a redcoat troop had me in durance at jennifer house, and while they affected to hold me at parole, i never gave consent to that, and so was kept a prisoner. they shut me in the wine-bin with a guard, and when the fellow was well soaked and silly, i bound and gagged him and broke jail. i took the river for it, meaning to outlie until the hue and cry was over; and just at dusk uncanoola dropped upon me and told me of your need. from that to helping him cut you out of your raffle with the cherokees was but a hand's turn in the day's work."
"a lucky turn for me," i said; and then at second thought i would deny the saying, though not for him to hear. but this was dangerous ground again, and i clawed off from it like a desperate mariner tempest-driven on a lee shore; asking him how he had learned the broadsword play, and where he got the antique claymore.
he laughed heartily, and more like my care-free dick, this time.
"thereby hangs a tale. i told you how i was out with the minute men in '76 at moore's creek, where we fought the scotchmen. it was our first pitched battle, and i opine it smelled somewhat of severity on both sides—no quarter was asked, and the tory macdonalds fought like fiends for king george, small cause as they had to love the house of hanover."
"how was that?" i would ask, being as little familiar with the low country settlements as any native-born carolinian could be.
"they were expatriates for the pretender's sake, many of them. mistress flora's husband was one of the prisoners we took. but, as i was saying, they were tories to a man, and they fought wickedly. when it was over, the prisoners would have fared hardly but for a woman. in the thick of the fight, mistress mary slocumb, of dobbs, whose husband was with us, came storming down upon the field, having rode a-gallop some forty-odd miles because she dreamed her goodman was killed. she begged for the prisoners, and so caswell hanged only those who were blood guilty—these and the house burners. a raw-boned piper named m'gillicuddy fell to my lot, and he is now my majordomo at jennifer house; as honest a fellow as ever skirled a pibroch."
"that was like you," i said; "to make a friend and retainer out of your prisoner. and so this highland piper has been your fencing master, has he?"
"'twas he taught me what little i know of the claymore play; and this stout old blade is his. 'tis as good as a woodman's ax when you have the knack of swinging it."
"truly," said i. "also, you seemed to have the knack, and the strength as well, in spite of the crippled arm you were carrying in a sling the night before when they haled you into colonel tarleton's court at appleby."
"a little ruse of war," he said, laughing and making a fist to show me his arm was strong and sound again. "'twas m'gillicuddy put me up to it, saying they would be like to deal the gentler with a wounded man. but how came you to know?"
here was another chance to tell him what he should be told, but the words would not say themselves.
"i stood within arm's reach of you that night," said i; and from that i hastened swiftly through the story of my trial as a spy and what it came to in the morning, and never mentioned margery's part in it at all.
"you have a bitter enemy in frank falconnet," was his comment, when i had made an end of this recounting of my adventures. "he knows you are in hiding hereabouts, and has been scouring the neighborhood well for you—or, more belike, for both of us."
"how do you know this?" i asked.
"i have both seen and heard. this den of ours opens on the river's edge, and, two days since, his indians came within an ace of nabbing me. 'twas just at dusk, and i made out to dodge them by doubling past in the canoe."
"but you say you have heard, as well?"
"yes."
"how?"
"don't ask me, jack."
i said i had no right to ask more than he chose to tell; and at this he blurted out an oath and let me have the sharp-edged truth.
"falconnet has an ally whose wit is shrewder than his. can you guess who it is?"
"no."
"'tis this same madge stair you have been defending, jack," he said, bitterly. "it seems that falconnet made sure we had both gone to join the army, which was but natural. if she were less than the spiteful little tory vixen that she is, she would have been content to let it rest so. but she would not let it rest so. with her own lips she assured falconnet he still had us to reckon with; nay, more—she made a boast of it that we would never go so far away from her."
weak and fever-shaken as i was, i yet made shift to get upon my elbow feebly fierce, denouncing it hotly for a lie.
"who slandered her like this, dick? put a name to the cur, and as i live and get my strength again, i'll hunt him down and choke him with that lie!"
"nay," he objected soberly; "that would be my quarrel, were there ever a peg to hang a quarrel on. but it came by a sure hand, and one that is friendly enough to all concerned. an old free borderer, ephraim yeates by name, brought me the tale. he had been spying round at appleby hundred, wanting to know, for some purpose of his own, why the redcoats and cherokees were hanging on so long; and this much he overheard one night when he was outlying under the window of the withdrawing-room. he says she was in a pretty passion at the baronet's slackness, stamping her foot at him and lashing him with the taunt that he was afeard of one or both of us."
i fell back on the bearskins to shut my eyes and call up all the might of love to grapple with this fresh misery. it was in this fierce conflict of faith against apparent fact that i descried the parting of the ways for the lover and the husband.
jennifer believed this most incredible thing, and yet he loved her—would go on loving her, as he had said, in spite of all. that was the lover's road, and i could never bear him company on it. could i believe her so pitiless cruel as this, i made sure no husband-love could live beyond that moment of conviction.
but at this perilous pass the husband's road ran truer than the lover's. richard believed her capable of this hard-hearted thing and went on loving her blindly in spite of it. but as for me, i said i would never give belief an inch of standing-room; that had i stood in ephraim yeates's shoes, having the witness of my own eyes and ears, i would still have found excuse and exculpation for her.
i stole a glance at jennifer. he was sitting with his face in his hands, a silent figure of a strong man humbled. he had called her a delilah, and the green withes of her binding cut sore into the flesh.
"you say you love her, dick; can you believe her capable of this, and yet go on loving her?" i asked.
he let me see his face. it was haggard and grief-marred.
"i'd pay the devil's own price could i say 'no' to that, jack. but i can not."
"then i swear i love her better than you do, richard jennifer. she hates me well—god knows she has good cause to hate me fiercely; yet i would trust her with my life."
i looked to see him pin me down at this; and though the words had fairly shaped and said themselves, i laid fast hold of my courage and was prepared to make them good. but he would only smile and draw the bearskin cover over me, tucking me in as tenderly as a mother, and saying very gently:
"so she has bewitched you, too; and now there are two poor fools of love instead of one. but you are stronger than i, jack. you will break the spell and put it down and live beyond it, and that i never shall—god help me!" and with that, he went to his own bed beside the fire, telling me i must lie quiet and try to sleep.
i did lie quiet, but sleep came not, nor did i woo it. for long past the time when i could hear his measured breathing, i lay awake to plan how i might draw the baronet's man-hunt to myself, and so free my loyal richard of the peril that by rights was mine.
