“Dess keep dis yer road fo’ ’bout half mile an’ yo’ strike ’pon de broad main road. Tek de right, an’ you go whar yo’ fancy take you. Good-by, Miss. Good-by, Boss; don’t yo’ fergit yo’ promise to tek me throo to de Yankees when you come back. I feered yo’ gwine fergit it, Boss.”
The spy said he would not, and they left him. The half mile was soon passed, though it turned out to be a mile and a half, and at length Mary’s companion looked back as they rode single file with Mary in the rear, and said softly, “There’s the road.”
As they entered it and turned to the right, Mary, with Alice in her arms, moved somewhat ahead of her companion, her indifferent horsemanship having compelled him to drop back to avoid a prickly bush. His horse was just quickening his pace to regain the lost position when a man sprang up from the ground on the farther side of the highway, snatched a carbine from the earth and cried, “Halt!”
The dark, recumbent forms of six or eight others could be seen enveloped in their blankets lying about a few red coals. Mary turned a frightened look backward and met the eye of her companion.
“Move a little faster,” said he, in a low, clear voice. As he did so, she heard him answer the challenge, as his horse trotted softly after hers.
“Don’t stop us, my friend; we’re taking a sick child to the doctor.”
“Halt, you hound!” the cry rang out; and as Mary glanced back three or four men were just leaping into the road. But she saw also her companion, his face suffused with an earnestness that was almost an agony, rise in his stirrups with the stoop of his shoulders all gone, and wildly cry, “Go!” She smote her horse and flew. Alice woke and screamed.
The report of a carbine rang out and went rolling away in a thousand echoes through the wood. Two others followed in sharp succession, and there went close by Mary’s ear the waspish whine of a minie-ball. At the same moment she recognized—once, twice, thrice—just at her back, where the hoofs of her companion’s horse were clattering, the tart rejoinders of his navy six.
“Go! lay low! lay low! cover the child!” But his words were needless. With head bowed forward and form crouched over the crying, clinging child, with slackened rein and fluttering dress, and sunbonnet and loosened hair blown back upon her shoulders, Mary was riding for life and liberty and her husband’s bedside.
“Go on! go on! They’re saddling up! Go! Go! We’re going to make it! Go-oo!” And they made it.