Francis Lynde

“ She rose, and I could see her eyes ashine for all the half-gloom of the candle-light.
"You are a loyal friend!" she said, and there was that within the words to make me glad, whatever fate the dawn should have in store for me. "You always think of others first; you think of others now, when—when death—Oh, Monsieur John! what can I do for you? Say quick! The man is coming to the door!"
"Now I have told you this, there is but one other thing, Margery dear; one little thing that will not let me die in peace. ”

“ Had I been Richard Jennifer, I know not what bitter reproach I should have found to hurl at the man who had thrice owed his life to me. But he said no word of what had gone before.
"You may give me the lie, if you like, John Ireton; I shall not strike you." He said it slowly, but his face was gray with anger. Then he added, hotly: "You know well that word was meant for me!"
At this—God forgive me!—my jealous wrath broke bounds and I cursed him for a beardless coxcomb who must needs think he stood alone in the eye of every woman he should meet. "She needs a man!" ”

“ If you should leave this room and house to-day you would never wear the buff and blue again, Captain Ireton."
"You mean they would hang me for a spy. Will you believe me, Margery, if I say I have not yet worn the buff and blue at all?"
"Oh!" The little exclamation was of pure delight. "Then they were all mistaken? You are no rebel, after all?"
Was ever man so tempted since the fall of Adam? As I have writ it down for you in measured words, I was no more than half a patriot at this time. And love has made more traitors than its opposites of lust or greed. ”

“ I gasped; "'twas you, then? I do believe you poisoned me in that dish of tea you sent me last night!"
She laughed, a bitter little laugh that I hated to think on afterward.
"You have a most chivalrous soul, Captain Ireton. I do not wonder you are so fierce to shake it free of the poor body of clay."
"But you do not deny it!" I cried.
"Of what use would it be? I have said that I would not have you die shamefully on the gallows; so I may as well confess to the poppy-juice in the tea. Tell me, Monsieur John; was it nasty bitter?"
"Good Lord!" I groaned; "are you a woman, or a fiend?" ”

“ Could Margery be brought to view it calmly, this was a sword to cut the knot of all entanglements.
As matters stood, the world would call her widow at my death; and since a woman is first of all the keeper of her own good name, she would never dare aver the truth. So in common justice she should own the name the world would call her by. Again, as matters stood, no wrong could come of it to her, or Richard Jennifer, or any. Dick would love her none the less because a dying man had given her his name for some few hours. ”

“ Here all was quiet as the grave, and the clamor of the Indian camp came softened by the distance to a low monotonous humming like the buzzing of a bee-hive. The flap of the tepee-lodge was closely drawn, and the bit of fire before it had burned out to a heap of white-ashed embers.
"They are safe as yet, thank God!" says Richard, heaving a most palpable sigh of relief. Then, with the fever in his veins to whip his natural ardor into hasty action: "'Twill be hours before Eph and the Catawba can come in by your upper ravine, Jack, and we shall never have a better chance than this. ”

“ All in a flash her laughing mood was gone and she stood before me like an accusing goddess.
"You told me once the past was like a dream to you; you must have dreamed that part of it, sir. And yet you said a little while ago that I had not failed in any wifely duty!"
"The time and circumstance were their own best excuse. Sure I am far from blaming you, my dear. But let it pass, 'tis enough that I know you love him as he loves you."
Again her mood changed in the twinkling of an eye. She sank down upon the hassock, laughing merrily.
"O wise Monsieur John! how well you read a woman's heart! ”

“ We marched in Indian file, Ephraim Yeates in the lead, Uncanoola at his heels, and the two of us heavier-footed ones bringing up the rear. Knowing the wooded wilderness by length and breadth, the old man held on through thick and thin, straight as an arrow to the mark; and so we had never a sight of the road again till we came out upon it suddenly at the ford of violence.
Here I should have been in despair for the lack of any intelligible hint to point the way; and I think not even Jennifer, with all his woodcraft, could have read the record of the onfall as Yeates and the Catawba did. ”

“ Though it was sadly out of season, the carcass 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 pass 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. ”

“ There had been a volley fire from the thicket-belly of black darkness, a swarming attack to a chorus of Indian yells, shouts from the men, shrieks from the women, confusion worse confounded in which the newsbearer himself had been unhorsed and trodden under foot. After which he knew no more till some one—his master, as he thought—kicked him alive and bade him mount and ride post-haste on the backward track to Appleby Hundred, crying the news as he went that Mistress Margery Stair and her maid had been kidnapped by the Indians. ”

“ Some such-like lie the baronet might have told, I thought; but when I saw him walk abroad with Margery on his arm, pacing back and forth beneath the oaks and bending low to catch her lightest word with grave and courtly deference that none knew better how to feign, I knew wherefore he stayed—knew and raged afresh at my own impotence, and for the thought that Margery was wholly at the mercy of this devil.
Yours is a colder century than was ours, my dears. Your art has tempered love and passion into sentiment, and hate you have learned to call aversion or dislike. ”

“ I know I have not your love—shall never have it. Also, I know that I have gained an enemy where once I had a loving friend. Richard Jennifer may kill me if he please—he shall have the chance to do it; but you are mine and shall be whilst I live to claim and hold you."
There was something less than anger in the blue-gray eyes when she let me see them; nay, I could have sworn there was a flash of playful mockery in them when she said: "Dear heart! how masterful rough you have grown, all in a moment, my Lord." And then the beautiful eyes filled and she said, "Poor Dick!" ”

“ Judge for yourselves, my dears, if this were the time, place or crisis for a man to fling himself upon the hall settle, grip his ribs and laugh like any lack-wit. Yet this is what Richard Jennifer did.
It was in the very midst of his gust of ill-timed merriment, while the horses were nosing niftily at their strange surroundings, and the hoof-strokes of the redcoat troop could be plainly heard on the gravel of the avenue, that I chanced to lift my eyes to the stair. There, looking down upon us with speechless astoundment in the blue-gray eyes, stood our dear lady. ”

“ Now we were only measurably isolated on the stair, and some sense of the hazard we took—a hazard involving her as well as Richard and myself—steadied me with a sudden shock.
"Control yourself," I whispered. "What is done, is done; and the misery is not all yours to suffer. Tell me how I may find the priest, and I will do my errand and begone."
"You can not stay to find him now—you must not," she insisted, coming out of the fit of despair with a rebound. "He is in the town—indeed, I know not where he is just now. Can you not endure it a little longer, Captain Ireton?" ”

“ Why don't you draw and cut me down?"
'Twas then Satan marked my dear lad for his very own.
"On guard!" he cried; "draw and defend yourself!" and with that the great claymore leaped from its sheath to flash in the starlight.
What with his reining back for space to whirl the steel I had the time to parry the descending blow. But at the balancing instant the brother-hating devil had the upper hand, whispering me that here was the death I coveted; that Margery might have her lover, if so she would, with her husband's blood upon his head. ”

“ Unlike all other irregulars I had ever seen, whose idea of a battle is to let off the piece and run, these mountain men held their fire like veterans, closing in upon the hilltop steadily and in a grim silence broken only by the shouting encouragements of the leaders—this until their circling line was completed.
Then suddenly from all sides of the beleaguered camp arose a yell to shake the stoutest courage, and with that the wood-covered slopes began to spit fire, not in volleys, but here and there in irregular snappings and cracklings as the sure-shot riflemen saw a mark to pull trigger on. ”

“ But Margery was before him. Ah, my dears, a man's wit is like a matchlock, fizzing and sputtering its way noisily to find the powder whilst the enemy hath time to ride up and saber the musketeer; but a woman's is like the spark in a tinder-box—a quick snip of flint and steel and you have your fire. In a flash my lady had torn down the heavy curtains from an inner doorway and was carpeting a horse path for us to the rear. ”

“ His eyes were black and ferrety; and his face, well seasoned by the Carolina sun, was swart as any Arab's. A man, I thought, who could be gentle-harsh or harsh-revengeful, as the mood should prompt; who could make well-turned courtier compliments to a lady and damn a trooper in the self-same breath.
This was that Colonel Banastre Tarleton who gave no quarter to surrendered men; and when I looked into the sloe-black eyes I saw in them for me a waiting gibbet.
"So!" he rapped out, when I was haled before him. "You're the spying rebel captain, eh? Are you alive enough to hang?" ”

“ There was no punctilio of the code of honor in this duel à outrance. Knowing our time was short, we fought as men who fight with halters round their necks; not to decide a nice point at issue, but to kill this accursed villain as we would kill a mad dog or a venomous reptile whose living on imperiled the life and honor of the woman we loved.
Thrice, whilst I held him in play, Dick rushed in to end it with a scythe-sweep of the broadsword; and thrice the Scottish death was turned aside by the flashing circle of steel wherewith the man striving shrewdly to gain time made shift to shield himself. ”

“ The summer day was all but spent when Richard Jennifer, riding express, brought me Captain Falconnet's challenge.
'Twas a dayfall to be marked with a white stone, even in our Carolina calendar. The sun, reaching down to the mountain-girt horizon in the west, filled all the upper air with the glory of its departing, and the higher leaf plumes of the great maples before my cabin door wrought lustrous patterns in gilded green upon a zenith background of turquoise shot with crimson, like the figurings of some rich old tapestries I had once seen in my field-marshal's castle in the Mark of Moravia. ”

“ When we burst down upon him, Yeates had his piece to his face and was drawing a bead on a stout man in cocked hat and plain regimentals whose horse was curveting and sidling in the nearer shallows; no less a figure, in truth, than my Lord Cornwallis himself, cheering his men on to the attack.
We had scarce made out the old hunter's target when the rifle spat fire, the curveting charger reared in its death plunge, and the British commander-in-chief, unhurt, as it seemed, was dragged from the entanglement of his stirrups by his aides. ”

“ Richard was a-crouch beside me in this peeping reconnaissance, and I could feel him trembling in impatient eagerness.
"It should be easy enough—what think you?" he whispered; and then, with a sudden grasp upon my wrist: "You are cool and steady-nerved, John Ireton; I swear you do not love her as I do!"
"Nay, I grant you that, Dick," said I, making sure that his excitement would obscure the double meaning in the admission. And then I added, sincerely enough: "She has never given me the right to love her at all." ”

“ No sooner did the volunteer captain catch a glimpse of his up-coming reinforcements than he must needs show us a clean pair of heels, running like a craven coward and shouting madly to his men to close with us and cut us down.
"After him!" roared Dick, who was by now as rage-mad as any berserker; and with a cut and thrust to right and left for the nipping trap-jaws we were out and away in chase.
Now you may mark this as you will; that whilst the devil hath need of his bond-servant he will come between with a miracle if need be to keep the villain breath of life in his vassal. ”