XX
IN WHICH WE STRIVE AS MEN TO RUN A RACE
It was some time before the affrighted black could give us any connected account of what had befallen; and when at length the story was told, all save the principal fact of the carrying off of Mistress Margery and her maid was hazy enough.
Pruned down to the simple statement of the fact, and with all the foolish terror chatterings weeded out, his news came to this: the party of homing revelers had been ambushed and waylaid at the fording of a creek some miles to the southward, and in the mellay the young mistress and her tire-woman had been captured.
So far as any actual witness of the eye went, the negro had seen nothing. There had been a volley fire from the thicket-belly of black darkness, a swarming attack to a chorus of Indian yells, shouts from the men, shrieks from the women, confusion worse confounded in which the newsbearer himself had been unhorsed and trodden under foot. After which he knew no more till some one—his master, as he thought—kicked him alive and bade him mount and ride post-haste on the backward track to Appleby Hundred, crying the news as he went that Mistress Margery Stair and her maid had been kidnapped by the Indians.
Pinned to the mark and questioned afresh, the slave could not affirm of his own knowledge that any one had been killed outright. Pinned again, it proved to be only a guess of his that the one who had given him his orders was his master. In the darkness and confusion he could make sure of nothing; had made sure of nothing save his own frenzy of terror and the wording of the message he carried.
When we had quizzed him empty we hoisted him upon his beast and sent him once more a-gallop on the road to Appleby Hundred. That done, a hurried council of war was held in which we four fell apart, three against one. Jennifer was for instant pursuit, afoot and at top speed; and Ephraim Yeates and the Catawba, abandoning their own emprise apparently without a second thought, sided indifferently with him. For my part, I was for going back to prepare in decent order for a campaign which should promise something more hopeful than the probability of speedy exhaustion, starvation and failure.
We grew hot upon it, Richard and I; he with a young lover's unrecking rashness, and I with an old campaigner's foresight to make me stubborn; and Ephraim Yeates and the Catawba drew aside and let us have it out. Dick argued angrily that time was the all-important item, and was not above taunting me bitterly, flinging the reproach of cold-blooded age in my face and swearing hotly that I knew not so much as the alphabet of love.
The taunts were passed in silence, since I would set them over against the irrevocable wrong I had done him, saying in my heart that nothing he could say or do should again tempt me to give place to the devil of jealous wrath.