This remark confirmed Jim Gannaway’s fears that the scouting party had really arrived in Tickfall. He had scanned the horizon many times since his arrival in that neighborhood on the evening before, and he wondered how that scouting party had arrived without his seeing them. His soul was tormented with anxiety, and he turned and looked at the girl as if he was seeing her for the last time. Dismounting from the buggy, he stood close beside her and said:
“Juan, I took a desperate risk in coming from the aviation camp to see you. I could not borrow a machine for the purpose, and could not have got leave of absence, so I had to swipe a machine. I told you I had come to get your promise to marry me, but I cannot ask you now because I have no idea what they will do to me when they take me back to camp.”
“What about that beautiful lie, Jim?” she asked with trembling lips.
“It would have been all right if I had made my way back to the camp without being caught; but now they have come after me, and there is nothing for me to tell but the beautiful truth.”
“What is the beautiful truth, Jim?” she asked.
“It is that I loved you so much that I was willing to take the most desperate chances to see you. Whatever may happen to me for what I have done will be but a small payment exacted from me in return for the pleasure I have had.”
With the adorable impudence of the Frenchwoman, Miss Juan straightened back in the buggy and looked at him with eyes that sparkled.
“I have a beautiful truth to say, also,” she asserted. “It is, that I love you, and if you ever get out of your troubles alive I will marry you; and if you get killed for what you have done, I will mourn for you forever and forever.”
She reached out and drew his head to her and kissed him.
“Go!” she said, as she pointed toward the Little Moccasin Swamp, “and remember that my love goes with you.”