The Master of Appleby Part 21

"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.

"d.a.m.n him as you please, d.i.c.k, 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 impa.s.sable 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, d.i.c.k," 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 pa.s.sionate 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 appet.i.te, 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 repet.i.tion 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 ma.s.sacres 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 sh.o.r.e; 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 d.i.c.k, 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 Sloc.u.mb, 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.