Paton who had heard what was said rushed into the house. He did not believe it, I think. In a trice he was out again. “I can’t open the door,” he panted. “The bed is against it. Round the house, Major!”
He led the way, we ran round the house. At the back the little window, ten feet from the ground, was open. Below it a plot of rough orchard ground, in which two or three trees had been felled, ran down to a branch. On the farther side of the water were some horse lines. We stared up at the window. “But, d—mme, man, he couldn’t do it!” Paton cried. “He couldn’t pass. Burton is as fat as butter!”
I swore. “That’s what I forgot!” I said. “He’s padded! He’s as lean as a herring!”
We ran round to the front again. The hallooing came faintly up the road. Already all the camp in that direction was roused and in a ferment. Two troopers galloped by us as we reached the road. An officer followed, spurring furiously. “That’s Swanton on the bay that won the match last week,” Paton said; and he yelled “Forrard away! After him! If Burton is on a common troop-horse,” he continued, “and he cannot have had time to pick and choose, his start won’t save him! The bay will be at his girths within five miles!”
“If they are to catch him they must do it quickly,” I groaned. “If he draws clear of the settlement, he knows the roads and they don’t.”
“He’ll be afraid to extend his horse until the alarm overtakes him,” Paton answered. “He would be stopped if he did, and questioned. There are many on the roads this morning. Haybittle noticed him, you see. But what does it all mean, Craven?” he continued.
We were standing, looking down the road. Half a hundred others, all staring the same way, were grouped about us. “He’s gone to warn Sumter,” I said dully. The excitement was dying down in me and I was beginning to see what lay before me—whether he escaped or were taken. “If he reaches Sumter before Wemyss attacks—and Wemyss may not attack before daybreak—heaven help us! The surprise will be on the wrong side!”
Paton whistled. “Our poor lads!” he said.
For a moment my anger rose anew. But, Paton looking curiously at me and wondering, I don’t doubt, why I had given the man the chance to escape, my heart sank again. Wilmer’s determined act, his grim persistence in his damnable mission, had sunk me below anything I had foreseen. If he escaped, the blood of our men lay on my conscience. If he were taken, I had bargained with him to no purpose, and soiled my hands to no end. My act must send him to the gallows, my very voice must witness against him! And Con? Ay, poor Con, indeed, I thought. For even as I stood stricken and miserable, gazing with scores of sight-seers down the road, and waiting for the first news of the issue, she rose before my mind’s eye, tall and slender and grave and dressed in white, as I had seen her on that evening, when she had flung herself into her father’s arms; the father whom I, then crouching in pain in the saddle below, was destined to bring to this! To bring to this! I thought with horror of my arrival at the Bluff, of the lights, the barking dogs, the blacks’ grinning faces and staring eyeballs! I thought with terror of her cry that ill would come of it—ill would come of it! I felt myself the blind tool of fate working out a tragedy, which had begun beside poor Simms’s body in that little clearing fringed with the red sumach bushes!
Why, oh why had not the man been content to stay where I had placed him? And why, oh why—I saw the error now—had I not taken the parole he had offered me? I did not doubt that he would have kept it, if I had trusted him. But I had refused it, and the chance of striking a new and final blow had tempted him to my undoing.