Jack turned his head slightly. “Letter?” he echoed. “What letter? And who read it?”
“Dat letter that Mars’ Rogers brought you from home. I don’t know who ’twas from but I reckons it was from ole marster. You was a-readin’ it when you dropped, and dat man Williams picks it up, and he reads somethin’ outer it, and Miss Bob’s face gets white and her eyes sorter pops and her mouth trimbles. Then she straightens up and turns her back on Williams and says for me to help her get you to bed. Then, after a couple of hours, when you’s restin’ sorter easy an’ the doctor done said you warn’t a-goin’ to be sick long she tells me she’s gwine away. She didn’t say whar she was gwine. She just went.”
Jack had listened silently. He was still very weak. “What was it that Williams read?” he asked.
Cato fairly groaned with the effort to remember. “Seems like I can’t exactly call it back, Mars’ Jack,” he confessed. “It was sumpin’ about somebody wanting you back home, but who ’twas I disremembers.”
“Well, where is the letter?”
Cato shook his head. “Deed I don’t know. Mars’ Jack,” he answered. “I ain’t seed it since. I looked for it the next day but I couldn’t find it an’ I ax Massa Rogers, but he say he don’t know nothin’ about it. I reckon it’s done lost.”
“Go and find Rogers and ask him to come here.”
While the negro was gone Jack lay quivering with excitement. He could not even remember that he had received a letter, much less what it contained. Cato’s words only added to his bewilderment. Naturally his people would want him at home, but he could not conceive how any statement to that effect could have troubled Alagwa, much less have caused her to leave him. The thought of Sally Habersham never once entered his mind.
Rogers came after a while, but he brought no enlightenment. The old hunter had left the room after giving the letter to Alagwa and had not been present when Jack fainted. He knew only that the letter was from the south, presumably from Jack’s home. Nor did he know whither the girl had gone. He did not know that she had gone at all till nearly twenty-four hours after her departure, and then he with the others was shut up in the fort, unable to venture out. And long before the siege was over all record of her going had been blotted out.
Later, Major Stickney, recovered from his fever, came to see Jack, but he knew even less than Rogers.