The Master of Appleby Part 17

"I would not take it--at your hands or his."

"You'd best take it. But in any event, you'll have your life and honorable safe-conduct beyond the lines."

"Make an end," I said again. "I understand you will obey his Lordship's order, or disregard it, as your own interest directs. What would you have me do?"

"A very little thing to weigh against a life. Mr. Gilbert Stair is my very good friend."

I let that go uncontradicted.

"His t.i.tle to the estate is secure enough, as you know, but you can make it better," he went on.

This saying of his told me what I had only guessed: that as yet he had not been admitted into Gilbert Stair's full confidence; also, that he had no hint of what had taken place in my chamber some hour or two past midnight. At that, a joy fierce like pain came to thrill me.

"Go on," said I.

"Your route to Camden lies through Charlotte. Your guard will give you time and opportunity to execute a quitclaim in Mr. Stair's favor."

"Is that all?" I asked.

"No; after that our ways must lie apart--or yours and Margery's, at all events. Give me your word of honor that you relinquish any claim you have, or think you have, upon her, and I pa.s.s this letter on to the ensign."

"And if I refuse?"

He came so near that I could see the lurking devil in his eyes.

"If you refuse? Harken, John Ireton; if you had a hundred lives to thrust between me and the thing I crave, I'd take them all." So much he said calmly; then a sudden gust of pa.s.sion seized him, and for once, I think, he spoke the simple truth. "G.o.d! I'd sink my soul in Calvin's h.e.l.l to have her!"

I could not wholly mask the smile of triumph that his words evoked. This fox of maiden vineyards was entrapped at last. I saw the fire of such a pa.s.sion as such a man may know burning in his eyes; and then I knew why he was come upon this errand.

"So?" said I. "Then Mistress Margery sent you here to save me?" 'Twas but a guess, but I made sure it hit the truth.

He swore a sneering oath. "So the priest carried tales, did he? Well, make the most of it; she would not have her father's guest taken from his bed and hanged like a dog."

I smiled again. "'Twas more than that: she would even go so far as to beg her husband's life a boon from that same husband's mortal enemy."

"Bah!" he scoffed. "That lie of yours imposed upon the colonel, but I had better information."

"A lie, you say? True, 'twas a lie when it was uttered. But afterward, some hour or so past midnight, by the good help of Father Matthieu, and with your Lieutenant Tybee for one witness and the lawyer for another, we made a sober truth of it."

I hope, for your own peace of mind, my dears, that you may never see a fellow human turn devil in a breath as I did then. His man's face fell away from him like a vanishing mask, and in the place of it a hideous demon, malignant and murderous, glared upon me. Twice his hand sought the sword-hilt, and once the blade was half unsheathed. Then he thrust his devil-face in mine and hissed his parting word at me so like a snake it made me shudder with abhorrence.

"You've signed your own death warrant, you witless fool! You'd play the spoil-sport here as you did once before, would you? Curse you! I wish you had a hundred lives that I might take them one by one!" Then he wheeled sharp upon his heel and gave the order to the ensign. "Belt him to the tree, Farquharson, and make an end of him. I've kept you waiting over-long."

They strapped me to a tree with other belts, and when all was ready the ensign stepped aside to give the word. Just here there came a little pause prolonged beyond the moment of completed preparation. I knew not why they waited, having other things to think of. I saw the firing line drawn up with muskets leveled. I marked the row of weather-beaten faces pillowed on the gun-stocks with eyes asquint to sight the pieces. I remember counting up the pointing muzzles; remember wondering which would be the first to belch its fire at me, and if, at that short range, a man might live to see the flash and hear the roar before the bullets killed the senses.

But while I screwed my courage to the sticking place and sought to hold it there, the pause became a keen-edged agony. A glance aside--a glance that cost a mightier effort than it takes to break a nightmare--showed me the ensign standing ear a-c.o.c.k, as one who listens.

What he heard I know not, for all the earth seemed hushed to silence waiting on his word. But on the instant the early morning stillness of the forest crashed alive, and pandemonium was come. A savage yell to set the very leaves a-tremble; a crackling volley from the underwood that left a heap of writhing, dying men where but now the firing squad had stood; then a headlong charge of rough-clad hors.e.m.e.n--all this befell in less than any time the written words can measure.

I sensed it all but vaguely at the first, but when a pa.s.sing horseman slashed me free I came alive, and life and all it meant to me was centered in a single fierce desire. Falconnet had escaped the fusillade; was making swiftly for his horse, safe as yet from any touch of lead or steel. So I might reach and pull him down, I cared no groat what followed after.

It was not so to be. In the swift dash across the glade I went too near the shambles in the midst. The corporal of the firing squad, a bearded Saxon giant, whose face, hideously distorted, will haunt me while I live, lay fairly in the way, his heels drumming in the death agony, and his great hands clutching at the empty air.

I leaped to clear him. In the act the clutching hands laid hold of me and I was tripped and thrown upon the heap of dead and dying men, and could not free myself in time to stop the baronet.

I saw him gain his horse and mount; saw the flash of, his sword and the skilful parry that in a single parade warded death on either hand; saw him drive home the spurs and vanish among the trees, with his horse-holding trooper at his heels.

And then my rescuers, or else my newer captors, picked me up hastily; and I was hoisted behind the saddle of the nearest, and so was borne away in all the hue and cry of a most unsoldierly retreat.

XIII

IN WHICH A PILGRIMAGE BEGINS

As you have guessed before you turned this page, the men who charged so opportunely to cut me out of peril were my captors only in the saving sense.

Their overnight bivouac was not above a mile beyond the glade of ambushment. It was in a little dell, cunningly hid; and the embers of the camp-fires were still alive when we of the horse came first to this agreed-on rallying point.

Here at this rendezvous in the forest's heart I had my first sight of any fighting fragment of that undisciplined and yet unconquerable patriot home-guard that even in defeat proved too tough a morsel for British jaws to masticate.

They promised little to the eye of a trained soldier, these border levies. In fancy I could see my old field-marshal,--he was the father of all the martinets,--turn up his nose and dismiss them with a contemptuous "_Ach! mein Gott!_" And, truly, there was little outward show among them of the sterling metal underneath.

They came singly and in couples, straggling like a routed band of brigands; some loading their pieces as they ran. There was no hint of soldier discipline, and they might have been leaderless for aught I saw of deference to their captain. Indeed, at first I could not pick the captain out by any sign, since all were clad in coa.r.s.est homespun and well-worn leather, and all wore the long, fringed hunting shirt and racc.o.o.n-skin cap of the free borderers.

Yet these were a handful of the men who had fought so stoutly against the Tory odds at Ramsour's Mill, their captain being that Abram Forney of whom you may read in the histories; and though they made no military show, they lacked neither hardihood nor courage, of a certain persevering sort.

"Ever come any closter to your Amen than that, stranger?" drawled one of them, a grizzled borderer, lank, lean and weather-tanned, with a face that might have been a leathern mask for any hint it gave of what went on behind it. "I'll swear that little whip'-snap' officer cub had the word 'Fire' sticking in his teeth when I gave him old Sukey's mouthful o' lead to chaw on."

I said I had come as near my exit a time or two before, though always in fair fight; and thereupon was whelmed in an avalanche of questions such as only simple-hearted folk know how to ask.

When I had sufficiently accounted for myself, Captain Forney--he was the limber-backed young fellow I had ridden behind--gripped my hand and gave me a hearty welcome and congratulation.

"My father and yours were handfast friends, Captain Ireton. More than that, I've heard my father say he owed yours somewhat on the score of good turns. I'm master glad I've had a chance to even up a little; though as for that, we should both thank the Indian." At which he looked around as one who calls an eye-muster and marks a missing man. "Where is the chief, Ephraim?"--this to the grizzled hunter who was methodically reloading his long rifle.

"He's back yonder, gathering in the hair-crop, I reckon. Never you mind about him, Cap'n. He'll turn up when he smells the meat a-cooking, immejitly, _if_ not sooner."

Here, as I imagine, I looked all the questions that lacked answers; for Captain Forney took it in hand to fit them out with explications.

"'Tis Uncanoola, the Catawba," he said; "one of the friendlies. He was out a-scouting last night and came in an hour before daybreak with the news that Colonel Tarleton was set upon hanging a spy of ours. From that to our little ambushment--"

"I see," said I, wanting s.p.a.ce to turn the memory leaves. "This Catawba: is he a man about my age?" Captain Forney laughed. "G.o.d He only knows an Indian's age. But Uncanoola has been a man grown these fifteen years or more. I can recall his coming to my father's house when I was but a little cadger."

At that, I remembered, too; remembered a tall, straight young savage, as handsome as a figure done in bronze, who used sometimes to meet me in the lonelier forest wilds when I was out a-hunting; remembered how at first I was afraid of him; how once I would have shot him in a fit of boyish race antipathy and sudden fright had he not flung away his firelock and stood before me defenseless.

Also, I recalled a little incident of the terrible scourge in '60 when the black pox bade fair to blot out this tribe of the Catawbas; how when my father had found this young savage lying in the forest, plague-stricken and deserted by all his tribesmen, he had saved his life and earned an Indian friendship.