The girl assented by a single word, uttered with an indifference which surprised me. And that was all.
Her silence had at least this advantage, that it left me free to consider her more closely, and I dropped back a horse’s length that I might do this at my ease. As my eyes rested on her, I do not know whether my admiration or my wonder were the greater. She must have been weary to the bone and sick at heart. She must have been racked by suspense and torn by anxiety. Every nerve in her tender frame must have ached with pain, every pulse throbbed with fever. Probably, and almost certainly, she had had to face moments when hope failed her, and she saw things as they really were; when she tasted the bitterness of the coming hour and recognized that all her efforts to avert it were in vain.
Yet every line of her figure, the carriage of her head, the forward gaze of her eyes told but one tale of steadfast purpose. She was no longer a mere woman, subject to woman’s weakness; but a daughter fighting for her father’s life. She was love in action, moulded to its purest shape. To suffer the eye to dwell on the curling lock that stained the white of her neck, to give a thought to the long lashes that shaded her cheek, to eye the curve of her chin, or the slender fullness of her figure, seemed to be at this moment a sacrilege. Her sex had fallen from her, and she rode as safe in my company as if she had been a man. More, I reflected that if there were many like her on the rebel side—if there were others who, daughters of our race, grafted on its virtues the spirit of this new land, then, I had no doubt of the issue of the unhappy contest in which we were engaged. In that case the thirteen colonies were as safe from us and as certainly lost to His Majesty as if they were the six planets and the seven Pleiades.
Nor in anything, I reflected, was her firmness more plain than in her treatment of me. She knew what I had done. She knew that she owed her misery to me. She must hate me in her heart. And doubtless when she had used me she would cast me aside. But in the meantime and because my help was needful to her plans, she was content to use me. She was willing to speak to me, to ride beside me, to breathe the same air with me, she could bear the sound of my voice and the touch of my hand. She could constrain herself to stoop even to this, if by any means she might save the father she loved and whom I had betrayed!
But while she did this, she was as cold as a stone, she made no pretence of friendship or of amity; and the light was failing, we had ridden ten miles, passing now a picket-guard, and now a lonely vedette on a hill-top, and many a sutler’s cart on the road, before she spoke again. Then as we descended a gorge, following the winding of a mountain stream that brawled below us amid mosses and alders, and under fern-clad banks, she asked me if we should reach the ferry on the Wateree by eight.
She spoke to me over her shoulder, for she was riding a pace in front of me and I had made no effort to place myself on a level with her. “I am afraid not,” I said. “If we reach the ferry by nine we shall be fortunate. Very soon it will be dark and we must go more slowly.”
“Then let us push on while we can,” she replied. And starting her horse with the spur she cantered down the uneven winding track, flinging the dirt and stones behind her, as if she had no neck and I had two arms. If she gave a thought to my drawback she must have decided that it was no time to consider it; as from her point of view it was not. Fortunately the sky was still pale and clear, the light had not quite failed, and presently without mishap we reached more level ground. Here the road, parting from the stream, wound on a level round the flank of a low hill, and for a mile or two we made fair progress. It was only when the darkness closed in on us at last that we drew rein, and trusting our horses’ instincts rather than our own eyes pushed forward, now at a trot and now at a walk.
“When does the moon rise?” she asked presently.
“At eight,” I told her.
“The ferry boat runs all night?”