“Who should it be?” my companion answered. “Don’t be a fool! I want you.”
A bar was removed—not very quickly—and the door was opened. By such firelight as issued from the room I saw an old man standing in the doorway, and behind him three or four white-faced women. He nursed a gun which he had barely the strength to level, and which he made haste to lower as soon as he had taken a look at us. “Lord-a-mercy, Cap’en, what a gunning there’s been,” he piped, peering up at us, all of a tremble. “We’ve been sweating here for hours, not knowing what moment the Tories and redcoats might be on us! Lord-a-mercy! Might ha’ been the last day by the sound of it!”
“Father, let the Captain tell us,” said one of the women.
“We’ve beaten them soundly,” my companion answered with less blatancy than I expected. He seemed, indeed, to have two ways of talking, and to be by no means without education when he pleased to show it. “In a month or less,” he continued, “there’ll not be a redcoat this side of the Santee High Hills; and if Marion does his work as well below, we shall be in Charles Town by Christmas! We shall have cleared Carolina, and you’ll have no more need to sweat! But there, I want you to take in a wounded man, Barter. He’s a broken arm, and a shoulder that, I expect, will give more trouble than the arm, and—”
“He’s welcome!” the woman broke in heartily. “He’s welcome to what we’ve got, Captain, and the Tories have left us! Let him come right in! Talking’s poor fare, and—”
Her voice quavered away to nothing, she left the sentence unfinished. Before I had grasped what was amiss, or understood what was doing, the man and the women had crowded back into the house, the lower half of the door was closed, I heard a bolt shot. “No, no! you’ve no right to ask us!” the old man quavered. “You’ve no right to ask us, Cap’en! He’s a redcoat! We’ll take in no King’s man and no Tory! Not we!”
“We daren’t, Cap’en Wilmer,” the woman said. “If we did the boys would take him out, and hang him, and, as likely as not, burn the house over us! It’s as much as our lives are worth to take him in!”
“See here,” the Captain answered, with more patience than I expected—it was clear that in spite of their refusal these people stood in awe of him. “See here! You can say that I put him here, Barter.”
“And if you were here, it might do!” the woman replied. “May be so and may be not. But you’re not here, Cap’en Wilmer, and when the boys’ blood’s up they’ll not listen to father nor to me! We’re a parcel of women, and you’ve no right to ask it. They’ve said, and you know it as well as I do, that they’ll burn down any house that shelters a redcoat. We’ll not take him!” she continued firmly, “and small kindness to him if we did! Phil Levi was here last Sunday and swore till he was black in the face what he’d do if we so much as fodder’d one of them! More by token, Cap’en, if you think it’s safe—why do you not take him in at the Bluff?”
“It’s a mile farther,” Wilmer said, “and there are reasons.”