I cast a backward glance at the long dark line of the house, and especially at the lighted window in which the girl’s figure showed as in a frame. She was watching us go, watching to the last without concern or pity. Certainly she had warned me, certainly she had done her best to persuade me to go while there was time. But in the bitterness of the moment I could not remember this. I could only think of her as unfeeling, unwomanly, cruel. I had read of such women, I had never met one, I had never thought to meet one; and I would think of her no more. I knew that in leaving the house I left my last hope behind me, and that outside in the night, in the power of these men, I must face what was before me without a thought of help.
A man dismounted to lower a sliprail, and even while I told myself that there was no hope I wondered if, crippled and weak as I was, I might still find some way to elude them. Clopety-clop, the horses went on again. The night wind rustled across the fields, crickets chirped, the squeal of some animal in its death-throe startled the ear. Clopety-clop!
I tried to direct my thoughts to that future now so near, which all must sometime face. I tried to remove my mind from the present, so swiftly ebbing away, and to dwell on the dark leap into the unknown, into the illimitable, that lay before me. But I could not. Hurried pictures of my home, of my mother, of the way in which the news would reach Osgodby—these indeed flitted across my mind. But though I knew, though I told myself, that escape was hopeless, and that in a few minutes, in an hour, according as these ruffians pleased, I should cease to exist, hope still tormented me, still held me on its tenter-hooks, still swung my mind hither and thither, as the chance of reprieve distracts the poor wretch in the condemned cell.
What if I broke away, one-armed as I was, and thrust my way through the men, taking my chance of obstacles? It would be useless, reason told me; and it might be the thing which they wished. It would absolve them from the last scruple, if any scruple remained. And at best I must be recaptured, for I knew neither my horse nor the country. Then—the mind at such times darts from subject to subject, unable to fix itself—I caught a word or two spoken by the riders in front.
“We can get one at the smithy,” Levi said.
“Confound you, you make me mad,” the other grumbled. “Why break our backs just to put him—” I missed the last word or two.
“You’re a fool, man! We must give Wilmer no handle,” Levi replied. “Let him suspect what he pleases, he can’t prove it. If he can’t show—” his voice dropped lower, I lost the rest.
So they were afraid of Wilmer, after all! But what was it that they were going to get at the smithy? And if we stayed there, was there any chance of help? I thought of Barter and the frightened women. Reason told me that there was no hope in them.
We were on the road now, riding in thick darkness under trees. The pain in my shoulder was growing with the motion, and from one moment to another, it was all I could do to restrain a groan. Frogs were croaking—cold for them I thought, with that strange leap of the mind from one subject to another. The men were silent, and save for the trampling of the horses and such sounds as I have named, the night was silent. How far were we going? Why need they be at the trouble of riding, and I at the pain, when the end, soon or late, would be the same?
Ha! there, before us was the faint glow of the smithy fire. Apparently the forge was at work to-night. It had not been lighted on the night of the King’s Mountain fight.