He was almost beside himself with pain and grief, but the one idea took possession of him, and in his brain the words repeated themselves over and over again: ‘Go back and find him! Go back and find him!’
‘Oh, if I had but a gun!’ he sighed, ‘I would make somebody pay for this.’
His hands struck against his cartridge belt. ‘Pah!’ he said in disgust, opening the pouch. ‘What is the use of you without a gun?’ Then a gasp of astonishment escaped him. His fingers, idly groping in the pouch, had encountered a piece of folded paper—two pieces.
For a moment he could not understand it, and then the meaning flashed across him, and everything became clear. In the dark of the cave he had picked up and assumed Ephraim’s belt instead of his own. The papers were General Shields’s despatch to General Frémont, and the written order to Colonel Spriggs regarding the escaped prisoners.
Luce’s first feeling was one of joy that, even if the Grizzly were taken, at all events nothing compromising would be found upon him. His second, a wild impulse to fling away the despatch, and rid himself of its dangerous companionship. But something restrained him in the very act, and the thought crossed him: ‘The fate of an army may depend upon that paper, and that army your own. You must carry it to General Jackson.’
Poor Lucius! He was on the horns of a dreadful dilemma. If he were caught with that paper upon him, it would be short shrift, he knew, and few questions asked. Yet if he did not deliver it, the consequences to the Confederates might be fearfully disastrous. And yet again, if he did attempt to carry it through, he must turn his back upon his friend, presuming him to be a prisoner, and after the thoughts of self-preservation in which he had indulged, how could he do that without laying himself open to the charge of grasping an excuse to ensure his own safety by an attempt to reach the Confederate lines?
He wrung his hands together in the extremity of his despair. Which was the right thing to do? Who would help him in this desperate strait?
He leaned against a tree, his head throbbing and his whole mind bewildered in the presence of the most serious problem he had ever had to face. Then once again came to him one of those mysterious, silent promptings, so frequent in the last anguished quarter of an hour. And this time it was as if Ephraim spoke: ‘Do yer duty, Luce, and never mind me.’
‘I will,’ he cried aloud, dashing the tears from his eyes. ‘I will. But I’ll come back and find you afterwards, Grizzly, if I die for it!’
He braced himself up to consider the best means to carry out his dual resolve. He knew very well that, no matter how many men might have been detached to the aid of the sentry at the ditch, the Federal outposts would still remain in their place, with beyond them the last line of sentinels on the side of Jackson’s army. To reach his goal he must first pass this obstacle, and he realised that in the ferment raised by the present crisis, the time for further stratagem had passed, and that his only hope lay in making a rush for it.