Chapter 22 - Page 2

but at any rate they tarried. If a war party could spend a night in baiting us and slaying our horses, there could be no very instant orders for the road. If this were so, a bold man might yet reach the Border line. At that moment it seemed to me a madman's errand. Even if I slipped past the watchers in the woods and the glens, the land between would be strewn with fragments of the Cherokee host, and I had not the Indian craft. But it was very seriously borne in upon me that 'twas my duty to try. God might prosper a bold stroke, and in any case I should be true to my trust.

But what of Elspeth? The thought of leaving her was pure torment. In our hideous peril 'twas scarcely to be endured that one should go. I told myself that if I reached the Border I could get help, but my heart warned me that I lied. My news would leave no time there for riding hillward to rescue a rash adventure. We were beyond the pale, and must face the consequences. That we all had known, and reckoned with, but we had not counted that our risk would be shared by a woman. Ah I that luckless ride of Elspeth's! But for that foolish whim she would be safe now in the cool house at Middle Plantation, with a ship to take her to safety if the worst befell. And now of all the King's subjects in that hour we were the most ill-fated, islanded on a sand heap with the tide of savage war hourly eating into our crazy shelter.

Before the daylight came, as I stood with my cheek to my musket, I had come to a resolution. In a tangle of duties a man must seize the solitary clear one, and there could be no doubt of what mine was, I must try for the Tidewater, and I must try alone, Shalah had the best chance to get through, but without Shalah the stockade was no sort of refuge. Ringan was wiser and stronger than I, but I thought I had more hill-craft, and, besides, the duty was mine, not his. Grey had no knowledge of the wilds, and Donaldson and Bertrand could not handle the news as it should be handled, in the unlikely event of their getting through alive. No, there were no two ways of it. I must make the effort, though in that leaden hour of weariness and cold it seemed as if my death-knell were ringing.

Morn showed a grey world, strewn with the havoc of the storm. The eagles were already busy among the dead horses, and our first job was to bury the poor beasts. Just outside the stockade we dug as best we could a shallow trench, while the muskets of the others kept watch over us. There we laid also the body of the man I had shot in the night. He was a young savage, naked to the waist, and curiously tattooed on the forehead with the device of what seemed to be a rising or setting sun. I observed that Shalah looked closely at this, and that his face wore an unusual excitement. He said something in his own tongue, and, when the trench was dug, laid the dead man in it so that his head pointed westwards.

We wrought in a dogged silence, and Elspeth's cheery