"Quick, quick! leave him; we will see about him later."
With no further attempt at caution, they sprang recklessly up the steep path, and, gaining the brow of the hill, ran at full speed toward the house. He noticed that there were no lights in the negro quarters, no sounds of the merry-making usually going on there in the early evening. Through the open windows on the side of the house, he had a hasty glimpse of the disordered dining-room. The great doors of the hall were open. They were on the porch now,—now at the door of the hall. It was empty. He paused a second. "Katharine, Katharine!" he called aloud, a note of fear in his voice, "where are you? Colonel Wilton!" In the silence which his voice had broken he heard a weak and feeble moan, which struck terror into his heart.
He ran hastily down the hall, and stopped at the dining-room door aghast. The smoking candles in the sconces were throwing a somewhat uncertain light over a scene of devastation and ruin; the furniture of the table and the accessories of the meal lay in a broken heap at the foot of it, the chairs were overturned, the curtains torn, the great sideboard had been swept bare of its usual load of glittering silver.
At his feet lay the body of a man, in the now familiar red uniform, blood from a ghastly sword-thrust clotted about his throat, the floor about his head being covered with ominous stains. A little farther away on the floor, near the table, there was the body of another man, in another uniform, a naked sword lying by his side; he had a frightful-looking wound on his forehead, and the blood was slowly oozing out of his coat-sleeve, staining the lace at his left wrist. Even as he looked, the man turned a little on the floor, and the same low moan broke from his lips. Talbot stepped over the first body to the side of the other.
"My God, it's Seymour," he said. He knelt beside him, as Katharine had done. "Seymour," he called, "Seymour!" The man opened his eyes slowly, and looked vacantly at him.
"Katharine," he murmured.
"What of her? is she safe?" asked Talbot, in an agony of fear.
"Raiders—prisoner," continued Seymour, brokenly, in a whisper, and then feebly murmured, "Water, water!"
"Here, Dick, get some water quickly! First hand me that decanter of wine," pointing to one which had fortunately escaped the eyes of the marauders. He lifted Seymour's head gently, and with a napkin which he had picked up from the floor, wiped the bloody face, washing it with the water the groom quickly brought from the well outside.
Then he poured a little of the wine down the wounded man's throat, next slit the sleeve of his coat, and saw that the scarcely healed wound in the arm had broken out again. He bandaged it up with no small skill with some of the other neglected table linen, and the effect upon Seymour of the stimulant and of these ministrations was at once apparent. With a stronger voice he said slowly,—