“I’m telling you, Dick, we’re miles deeper in the ditch than we’ve been any year since this cursed war began!” he summed up gloomily, when we had chafed in sour impatience, as all men did, over the sorry condition of our rag-tag, starving patriot army. “Four months ago we had eight thousand men fronting Sir Henry Clinton here in the Highlands; to-day we couldn’t muster half that number. Where are all the skulkers?”
“Gone home to get something to eat,” I laughed. “We need to hang a few commissary quartermasters, Jack.”
“It isn’t all in the commissary,” he contended, “though I grant you there are empty bellies enough among us. But above the belly-pinching, it’s the example set by that thrice-accursed traitor, Arnold, in his going over to the enemy. Not a night passes now but some troop breaks the number of its mess by losing a man or two to the southward road.”
“But not Baylor’s,” I qualified. Pettus was a lieutenant in Major Henry Lee’s Light Horse Legion, and I a captain in Baylor’s Horse, at the moment posted at Salem on scouting duty.
“Our record is broken,” he confessed, staring soberly at his wine-cup. “Some time back, John Champe, our sergeant-major, took the road at midnight, beat down the vidette with the flat of his sword, and galloped off, with Middleton and his troop in hot pursuit. They rode till dawn, and were in good time to see Champe take to the river at Bergen and swim out to a king’s ship anchored off-shore.”
“We of Baylor’s are whole yet, thank God, save for the potting of a man or so now and then by the Cow-boys,” I boasted.
“The Light Horse is stirred to the very camp-followers by Champe’s desertion,” Pettus went on, with growing bitterness. “It’s the honor of the South.” Then, Van Ditteraick’s vile vintage getting suddenly into his blood, he clapped bottle to cup again and sprang to his feet. “A toast!” he cried. “Fill up and drink with me to the honor of Virginia!”
“Always and anywhere, and in any pot-liquor, however bad,” said I; and when he let me have the bottle I filled the cup, and was glad to note that my hand was still steady.
“Now, then—standing, man, standing!” he bellowed, waving me up: “Here’s to the loyalty of the Old Dominion, and may the next Virginian who smirches it, though that man be you or I, Dick Page, live to lose the woman he loves, and then die by inches on a gibbet, with crows to pluck his eyes out!”
If I smiled in my cup it was at the naming of a woman in the curse, and not at Jack’s extravagance, nor at the savage sentiment. For we of Baylor’s had privately agreed and sworn to flay alive and burn the first man caught deserting the colors, no matter what his name should be nor how high his standing.