Cary turned in his saddle and looked behind him. Clear night, and dark and still through all the few miles between this place which she had not passed and the mill which she had.... The men with him had been in the saddle since dawn. They were weary enough, and under orders to report that night at Winnsboro’. At the end he sent on upon the road well-nigh all the troop, then turned himself and with but three or four horsemen behind him, began to retrace the road to the mill. Light and sound of the picket post died behind him, there came only the quiet miles of a lonely country and the stars above.
The night was old when, suddenly, near again to the burned mill, there burst out of a by-path the men who had burned it. They had taken the southward running road, had burned two houses that lay that way, then encountering rough country and a swollen river, had elected, horse and foot, to march back the way they came. Now, emerging suddenly upon the wider road, they saw before them four horsemen, divined that they were grey, and with a shout joined battle.
“They are six to one, men!” cried Cary. “Save yourselves!”
There came the crash. He fired twice, emptying a saddle and giving a ball in the shoulder to the half-drunken giant who seemed to be leading. Then with oaths three pushed against him. His horse reared, screamed and fell, pierced by bullets. He leaped clear of the saddle and fired again, breaking a man’s raised sabre arm. There was a blinding flash, a deafening sound—down, down he went into blackness and silence, into night deep as the nadir....
When he came slowly, slowly back to feeling and consciousness he was alone. It was dawn, he saw that. For a long time there seemed nothing but the fact of dawn. Then he suddenly rested his hand on the earth and tried to lift himself. With the vain effort and the pain it brought came a troubled memory. He put his hand to his side and felt the welling blood. The wound, he presently saw, was deep and hopeless, deep enough to let death in. His head fell back against the bank behind him and he faced the dawn. He was lying at the edge of the road, his dead horse near. All noise and war and strife were gone, the three or four men who had been with him cut down, or taken prisoner, or fled, the blue triumphant band gone its way. There was an utter stillness, and the dawn coming up cool and pure like purple lilies. He slightly turned his head. About him was a field of sedge with scattered pines. The wind was laid, and it was not cold. He knew that his hurt was mortal.... Suddenly, as from another world, there came to him a very faint cry—half cry for help, half plaint to a heaven blind and deaf. He dragged himself to his knees, with his hand cleared the mist from his eyes and gazed across an half acre of sedge to a heap of ruined stones like a broken wall. The voice rose again, faintly. With a vast, illuminating rush came fully memory and knowledge, and like a dying leap of the flame, strength. He rose and crossed the sedge.
She was lying where her murderers had left her, beneath the ruined wall. She was dying, but she knew him when, with a cry, he fell beside her, stretched his arms above her. “Yes,” she said. “I believed that you would come.” Then, when she saw the blood upon him, “Are you going with me?”
“Yes, Love,” he said. “Yes, Love.”
The great dawn climbed stealthily, from tint to deeper tint, from height to height. The pine trees stood like dreaming palms, and the sedge spread like a floor of gold. “The river!” she said, “the great river that is going to eat us up at last! How it beats against Cape Jessamine!”
“When I saw Cape Jessamine go down, I thought only ‘If I were there! If I were with her, together in the wave!’”
Their voices died to whispers. With a vague and fluttering hand she touched his brow and lips. “I wanted the child to live—I wanted that. But it was not to be—it was not to be—”