“Good night!” she called back to him.
He shouted a reply; his voice came to her faintly, wrathful and defiant, but his words were whirled away upon the storm.
CHAPTER XV
POLITICS MAKE STRANGE BED-FELLOWS
She quieted Nelly into a canter, made her way through the soundly sleeping back streets, and at length emerged from the city and descended into the River Road, which was slightly shorter than Grayson’s Pike which led over the high back country to The Sycamores. She knew what Nelly could do, and she settled the mare down into the fastest pace she could hold for the eleven miles before her.
Katherine was aquiver with suspense, one moment with hopeful expectation, the next with fear that her deductions were all awry. Perhaps Blake had not gone out to meet a confederate. And if he had, perhaps The Sycamores was not the rendezvous. But if her deductions were correct, who was this secret ally? Would she be able to approach them near enough to discover his identity? And would she be able to learn the exact outlines of the plot that was afoot? If so, what would it all prove to be?
Such questions and doubts galloped madly through her mind. The storm grew momently in fierceness. The water and fury of three months of withheld storms were spending themselves upon the earth in one violent outburst. The wind cracked her skirt like a whip-lash, and whined and snarled and roared among the trees. The rain drove at her in maddened sheets, found every opening in her raincoat, and soon she was as wet as though dropped in the river yonder. The night was as black as the interior of a camera, save when—as by the opening of a snapshot shutter—an instantaneous view of the valley was fixed on Katherine’s startled brain by the lightning ripping in fiery fissures down the sky. Then she saw the willows bending and whipping in the wind, saw the gnarled old sycamores wrestling with knotted muscles, saw the broad river writhing and tossing its swollen and yellow waters. Then, blackness again—and, like the closing click of this world-wide camera, there followed a world-shaking crash of thunder.
Katherine would have been terrified but for the stimulant within. She crouched low upon her horse, held a close rein, petted Nelly, talked to her and kept her going at her best—onward—onward—onward—through the covered wooden bridge that spanned Buck Creek—through the little old village of Sleepy Eye—up Red Man’s Ridge—and at last, battered, buffeted, half-drowned, she and Nelly drew up at the familiar stone gateway of The Sycamores.