"Another time, Richard. I am strangely unnerved and dizzy-headed now. By and by, when I am stronger, I will tell you all."
Taking a reproach where none was meant, he sprang up with a self-aimed malison upon his lack of care for me, stirred the fire alive and brewed me a most delicious-smelling cup of broth. And afterward, when I had drunk the broth with some small beckonings of returning appetite, he spread his coat to screen me from the fire light and would have driven me to sleep again.
"At any rate, you shall not talk," he promised. "If you are wakeful I will talk to you and tell you what little I have gleaned about the fighting."
His news was chiefly a later repetition of Father Matthieu's and Captain Abram Forney's, but there was this to add: the Congress had appointed the Englishman, Horatio Gates, chief of the army in the South, and this new leader was on his way to take command.
De Kalb, with the Maryland and Delaware lines and Colonel Armand's legion, was encamped on Deep River, waiting for the newly-appointed general; and Caswell and Griffith Rutherford, with the militia, were already pressing forward to some handgrips with my Lord Cornwallis in the South.
Nearer at hand, the partizan war-fire flamed afresh wherever a Tory company met a patriot, and there were wicked doings, more like savage massacres than fair-fought battles of the soldier sort.
When he had made an end of his small war budget, I set him on to tell me how he came to be at hand to help me so in the nick of time on the night of the cabin sack.
"'Twas partly chance," he said. "A redcoat troop had me in durance at Jennifer House, and while they affected to hold me at parole, I never gave consent to that, and so was kept a prisoner. They shut me in the wine-bin with a guard, and when the fellow was well soaked and silly, I bound and gagged him and broke jail. I took the river for it, meaning to outlie until the hue and cry was over; and just at dusk Uncanoola dropped upon me and told me of your need. From that to helping him cut you out of your raffle with the Cherokees was but a hand's turn in the day's work."
"A lucky turn for me," I said; and then at second thought I would deny the saying, though not for him to hear. But this was dangerous ground again, and I clawed off from it like a desperate mariner tempest-driven on a lee shore; asking him how he had learned the broadsword play, and where he got the antique claymore.
He laughed heartily, and more like my care-free Dick, this time.