This assurance convinced the Federal officer. The old servant's interest was so obviously with the invading force that his motive was not open to question. Moreover, it was not the first time that Baynell had dreamed of the Confederate officer, the erstwhile lover of Leonora Gwynn, whose splendid portrait hung on the wall, and whom she often mentioned with interest.
When the surgeon next called he expressed to his patient great surprise: "It is very natural that in your state of convalescence you should grow dizzy and fall; but I can't for my life understand how you contrived to get such a blow from the edge of a step. It has all the style about it of a hit straight from the shoulder of an expert boxer. Uncle Ephraim doesn't happen to be something of a pugilist, now?" he added jocosely, smiling and glancing at the old negro.
"I don't happen to be nuffin, sah, dat ain't perlite," grinned the amenable "Janus."
"Your friends downstairs seemed frightened out of their wits, Baynell,—lest your wound should be imputed to them, I suppose," the surgeon said openly, for he did not consider the presence of the ex-slave.
"Yes, sah!" put in Uncle Ephraim, "eider me or Marster, or de widder 'oman, or de ladies air sure bound ter hev' knocked him up dat way, kase 'twould take a puffick reel-foot man ter fall downstairs dat fashion. Yah! Yah!"
It did not occur to Baynell to doubt this statement, and not one word did he say to the surgeon of his dream of the presence of the Confederate officer. He made no effort to account for the disaster, merely lending himself to the surgeon's view that he had grown suddenly dizzy and the stairs were steep in the third flight.
This gave the surgeon a disquieting sense of suspicion some time afterward. When returning from his tour of duty at the hospital he was again in the camp, he heard there the amazing rumor among the soldiers that a Confederate officer, covered with blood, had been seen to issue from the Roscoe house and with lightning-like speed disappear among the shrubbery. He wondered that Baynell should not have mentioned the commotion, forgetting that as he was unconscious he might be still unaware of the fact.
Dr. Grindley was not of a designing nature; but he was consciously experimenting when he said, rather banteringly, on his next visit, "How about the notion that there was a Confederate officer concealed in this house?"
Baynell looked annoyed. He had heard as yet not an allusion to the raid upon the house during the period of his insensibility, and he did not know that the presence of a Confederate officer had even been rumored. He supposed that the doctor referred to the chance question he had asked Uncle Ephraim, and he deprecated the fact that the old man should have heedlessly repeated this. The dream of the altercation, as he fancied the recollection, was still vague in his mind, and with that quality of unreality and so blended with other visions of his delirium and fever that he in naught doubted its tenuous state as a figment of a disordered brain.
"There was no Rebel," he said somewhat gruffly.