The Master of Appleby Part 34

He nodded, and we backed away to make another circuit which fetched us out on the up-valley side of the encampment. Here we could look down into a smaller glade or bottom meadow on the stream where the horses of the band were cropping the lush gra.s.s. It was the sight of these, and of Margery's black mare among them, that set me thinking of a pickeering venture to the full as harebrained as that from which I had but now dissuaded Richard Jennifer.

"We shall need another mount, and Mistress Margery's saddle," I said.

"Lie you close here whilst I play the horse-thief on these reavers."

But my dear lad was rash only for himself. "Now who is daft?" he retorted. "The Catawba himself could never run that gantlet and come through alive."

"Mayhap," I admitted. "But yet--"

He cut me off in the midst, winding an arm about my head by way of an extinguisher. One of the redcoat troopers lounging before the great fire had risen and was coming straight for our hiding place.

I saw not what to do; should have done nothing, I dare say, till the man had walked fair upon us. But Richard was quicker witted.

"Give me your sword!" he muttered; "mine will be too long to shorten upon," and when the Englishman's next stride would have kicked us out of hiding, d.i.c.k rose up before him like the devil in a play, gripped him by the collar and laid his sword's point at his throat.

"Follow me, step for step, or you are a dead man!" he commanded; and so, pacing backward, he led the fellow, with the hulking body of him for a shield and mask, out of the circle of firelight and into the safer shadows of the forest.

When I had made a creeping detour to join him, he still had his man by the collar and was emphasizing the need for silence by sundry p.r.i.c.kings with the Ferara.

"Say, quick! what to do with him, Jack?" he demanded, when I came up; and now my slower wit came into play.

"Out of this to some safer dressing-room, and I'll show you," said I; and forthwith we marched our prize up the valley a long musket-shot or more.

When the soldier had leave to speak he begged right l.u.s.tily for his life, as you would guess; but we gave him a short shrift. If the plan I had in mind should have a fighting chance for success it must be set in train before this trooper should be missed.

So, having first gagged the poor devil with his own neckerchief, we stripped him quickly; and I as quickly donned the borrowed uniform and became, at least in outward semblance, a light-horse trooper of that king whose service I had once forsworn. The items of small-clothes, waistcoat and head-gear fitted me pa.s.sing well, but when it came to the boots we stuck fast, and I was forced to wear my own foot-coverings.

The change made,--and you may believe no play-house actor of them all ever doffed or donned a costume quicker,--we bound our luckless captive hand and foot, pinned him face downward in the sward, and so leaving him with only his boots for a memento,--happily for him the night was no more than goose-flesh cool,--we raced back to our peeping-place on the skirting of the camp ground.

Here d.i.c.k wrung my hand, calling himself all the knaves unspeakable for letting me take a risk which he was pleased to call his own; and with that I stepped out into the firelight and was fair afoot in the enemy's camp.

XXVIII

IN WHICH I SADDLE THE BLACK MARE

Having so good a disguise, the thing I had set myself to do would seem to ask for little more than peaceful boldness held in check by common caution.

The point where I had broken cover to step into the circle of fire light was nearly equidistant from the Englishmen's camp on the right and the horse meadow on the left, so I had not to pa.s.s within recognition range of the great fire; indeed, I might have skulked in the laurel cover all the way, thus coming to the horses unseen by any, but that I was afraid Falconnet might miss his trooper. So I thought it best to show myself discreetly.

Copying our captive's lounging stride, I first held a sauntering course down to the stream's edge, keeping the great camp-fire and the droning Indian hive well to the right and far enough aloof to baffle any over-curious eye at either. Coming to the stream without mishap, I stopped and made a feint of drinking; after which I crossed and climbed slowly toward the makeshift powder magazine.

As I have said, the camp was pitched in a small savanna or natural clearing on the right bank of the little river. This clearing was hedged about by the forest on three sides, and backed by the densely wooded steeps and crags of the western cliff. I guessed the compa.s.s of it to be something more than an acre; not greatly more, since the fire at the troop camp lighted all its boundaries.

On the left or opposite bank of the stream there was no intervale at all. The ground rose sharply from the water's edge in a rough hillside thickly studded and bestrewn with boulders great and small; fallen cleavings and hewings from the crags of the eastern cliff. 'Twas at the foot of one of the boulders, a huge overhanging ma.s.s of weather-riven rock facing the camp, that the powder cargo was sheltered; so isolated to be out of danger from the camp-fires.

From the hillside just below this powder rock I could look back upon the camp _en enfilade_, as an artilleryman would say. Nearest at hand was the half-moon of Indian lodges with the hollow of the crescent facing the stream, and a caldron fire burning in the midst. Around the fire a ring of warriors naked to the breech-clout kept time in a slow shuffling dance to a monotonous chanting; and for onlookers there was an outer ring of squatting figures--the visiting Tuckaseges, as I supposed.

Beyond the Indian lodges, and a little higher up the gentle slope of the savanna, were the troop shelters; and beyond these, half concealed in the fringing of the boundary forest, was the tepee-lodge of the women.

On the bare hillside beneath the powder magazine I made no doubt I was in plainest view from the great fire, and the proof of this conclusion came shortly in a bellowing hail from Falconnet.

"Ho, Jack Warden!" he called, making a speaking-trumpet of his hands to lift the hail above the chanting of the Indian dancers. "Have a look at that shelter whilst you are over there and make sure 'twill shed rain if the weather shifts."

Now some such long-range marking down as this was what I had been angling for. So I came to attention and saluted in soldierly fashion, thereby raising a great laugh among my pseudo-comrades around the trooper fire--a laugh that pointed shrewdly to the baronet-captain's lack of proper discipline. But that is neither here nor there. Having my master's order for it, I climbed to the foot of the powder rock.

Here the bare sight of all the stored-up devastation set me athirst with a fierce longing for leave to snap a pistol in the well-laid mine. For if these enemies of ours had planned their own undoing they could never have given a desperate foeman a better chance. To hold the pine boughs of the rude shelter in place they had piled a great loose wall of stones around and over the cargo; and the firing of the powder, heaped as it was against the backing cliff of the boulder, would hurl these weighting stones in a murderous broadside upon the camp across the stream.

But since my dear lady would also share the hazard of such a broadside, I had no leave to blow myself and the powder convoy to kingdom come, as I thirsted to--could not, you will say, having neither pistol to snap nor flint and steel to fire a train. Nay, nay, my dears, I would not have you think so lightly of my invention. Had this been the only obstacle, you may be sure I should have found a way to grind a firing spark out of two bits of stone.

But being otherwise enjoined, as I say, I turned my back upon the temptation and held to the business in hand, which was to reach and recross the stream higher up and so to come among the horses.

As I had hoped to find them, the saddles were hung upon the branches of the nearest trees, Margery's horse-furnishings among them. At first the black mare was shy of me, but a gentling word or two won her over, and she let me take her by the forelock and lead her deeper into the herd where I could saddle and bridle her in greater safety.

My plan to cut her out was simple enough. Trusting to the darkness--the horse meadow was far enough from the fires to make a murky twilight of the ruddy glow--I thought to lead the mare quietly away up the stream and thus on to the foot of that ravine by which we hoped to climb to the old borderer's rendezvous on the plateau. But when all was ready and I sought to set this plan in action, an unforeseen obstacle barred the way. To keep the horses from straying up the valley an Indian sentry line was strung above the grazing meadow, and into this I blundered like any unlicked knave of a raw recruit.

Had I been armed, the warrior who rose before me phantom-like in the laurel edging of the meadow would have had a most sharp-pointed answer to his challenge. As it was,--I had left my sword with Jennifer because the captured trooper whose understudy I was had left his sword in camp,--I tried to parley with the sentry. He knew no word of English, nor I of Cherokee; but that deadlock was speedily broken. A guttural call summoned others of the horse-keepers, and among them one who spoke a little English.

"Ugh! What for take white squaw horse?" he demanded.

"'Tis the captain's order," I replied, lying boldly to fit the crisis.

At that they gave me room; and had I hastened, I had doubtless gone at large without more ado. But at this very apex point of hazard I must needs play out the part of unalarm to the fool's _envoi_, taking time to part the mare's forelock under the head-stall, and looking leisurely to the lacings of the saddle-girth.

This foolhardy delay cost me all, and more than all. I was still fiddle-faddling with the girth strap, the better to impose upon my Indian horse-guards, when suddenly there arose a yelling hubbub of laughter in the camp behind. I turned to look and beheld a thing laughable enough, no doubt, and yet it broke no bubble of mirth in me.

Half-way from the nearest forest fringe to the great fire a man, white of skin, and clothed only in a pair of trooper boots, was running swiftly for cover to the nearest pine-bough shelter, shouting like an escaped Bedlamite as he fled. It asked for no second glance, this apparition of the yelling madman; 'twas our captive soldier, foot-loose and racing in to raise the hue and cry.

Now you may always count upon this failing in a cautious man, that at a crisis he is like to do the unwisest thing that offers. This cutting out of Margery's mare was none so vital a matter that I should have risked the marring of Ephraim Yeates's plan upon it. Yet having done this very thing, I must needs make a bad matter infinitely worse.

Instead of mounting to ride a charge through the camp, and so to draw the pursuit after me toward the cavern entrance, as I should, I slapped the mare to send her bounding through the guard line, s.n.a.t.c.hed a saddle from its oak-branch peg to hurl it in the faces of the sentry group, and darting aside, plunged into the laurel thicket to come by running where I could and creeping where I must to that place where I had left Richard Jennifer.

All hot and exasperated as I was, 'twas something less than cooling to find d.i.c.k a-double on the ground, holding his sides and laughing like a yokel at his first pantomime.

"Oh, ho, ho! did you--did you twig him, Jack?" he gasped. "Saw you ever such a mincing puss-in-boots since the Lord made you? Ah! ha! ha!"

"The devil take your ill-timed humor!" I cried. "Up with you, man, and let us vanish while we may!"

By this the camp was in a pretty ferment, as you would guess--our late captive having had s.p.a.ce enough to tell his tale. Drunk or sober, Falconnet was afoot and alert, shouting his orders to the Englishmen who were scrambling for their arms, and to the Indians who came swarming up from the lodges.

Whilst we looked, the Cherokees scattered like a company of trained gillies to beat us out of cover; and when the hunt was fairly up, the baronet-captain set his men in marching order to surround the wigwam of the captives.

As yet there was time for a swift retreat up the valley, or at least for the choosing of some battle-field of our own where the enemy need not outnumber us twenty to one; and again I urged Richard to bestir himself.

But it was the sight of Falconnet's troopers deploying to surround the tepee-lodge, and not any word of mine, that broke his merriment in the midst.

At a bound he was up and handing me my sword.

"Good by, Jack; go you whilst you can. You'll be like to meet Eph and the Catawba coming in; turn them back and tell them to bide their time."