Chapter XIV: Part 14

It was near dawn when they made this discovery. The rain had ceased at last, though the clouds were still scudding through the gusty sky. A late waning moon showed in the east, infinitely melancholy in the cloud-rack of the tempest. The simple voices of the denizens of the swamp, overawed to silence by the violence of the storm, resumed their vague indiscriminate nocturne, the shrilling of a screech-owl, at intervals the noisy clangor of cranes, and once the bloodcurdling scream, of a catamount. The party had halted on the crest of a ridge overlooking the swollen watercourse, lashed to a swifter current by the turbulence of the wind. The boat, which they had left with every security in this solitary place, had been yet more definitely concealed. A tricksy gust had upset it, and in the glimmering light, as it floated bottom upward, it was not recognized.

As the two British soldiers patroled the banks, and now consulted together, and again hastily resumed the search, Push-koosh, standing near the prisoner, looking backward over his shoulder again and again, murmured against this loss of time. Then once more he scanned the woodsy track by which they had come, all glistening with moisture, and illumined by the drear light of the waning moon. He so obviously feared a rescue, that Laroche’s heart could but plunge at the prospect. A heron cried out dismally from the dense cane and marshy tangles beside the river, attesting the solitude. If but the rope that bound his hands were cut! The two men on the margin below passed the boat and repassed it, as held by its sheet-chain tangled about the submerged roots of a tree, its capsized bottom seemed but a boulder washed by the ripples as it lay in the shadow. As once more Push-koosh glanced warily, impatiently, over his shoulder, Laroche suddenly bethought himself of the peculiarities of his character and the details of their long service together. There was no mistaking his identity,--it was sufficiently attested by the contour of his head, with the silver band on his flat forehead, the red flamingo feathers all tipped with silver by the moon, and the beautiful tones of his velvet voice as he muttered his Choctaw imprecations.

“Ah, Push-koosh,” cried Laroche softly, a vibration of hope and joy in his tone, “_mon Bébé, mon petit chou! Je reconnais bien ton bon cœur._”

Push-koosh turned instantly and looked straight at the French officer. The moonlight was full in the Indian’s dark inscrutable eyes.

“There is gold in the bottom of my tobacco bag, Prince Baby,--much gold. Cut this rope and it is yours!”

An instant of doubt, and then the Choctaw approached with that sly supple motion so like the step of a catamount. One stroke of his knife and Laroche would be free to flee through the marshy forests, while the two British soldiers and the Muscogee tribesmen hunted for the boat that was before their eyes, and wrangled till the echoes were loud and discordant.

The Choctaw’s touch was laid, not upon the pouch with its treasure amidst the tobacco that had escaped the search of the Highlander, but upon the bound hands held out to him with a piteous eagerness of entreaty. Then looking the captive directly in the eye, Push-koosh said with an indescribable fullness of significant reminder, “_Eho chookoma!_” (the beautiful woman!)

XX

THE snow lay deep at Fort Prince George when they returned.[12] The air was now clear of flakes, invested with that strange absolute funereal stillness characteristic of the muffled world, but the sky was still darkly gray and with a menace in its motionless solemnity. The roofs of the block-houses and barracks showed densely white against the slate-colored clouds; not even about the great smoking chimneys was a trace of thaw. The palisades that surmounted the unbroken white walls of the rampart upheld fluffy drifts lodged among the sharp-pointed stakes. The glacis was only such a faint outline as might remain in vague traces of a prehistoric work. The prickly branches of a strong abatis on two sides of the fort thrust out darkly from the overwhelming banks like the protest of a buried forest. The thousand stumps, relics of the encampment of Colonel Grant’s army here the preceding year, were utterly submerged, and gave more than one of the approaching party a headlong fall as the two British soldiers, the Choctaw Mingo, and the Muscogee guard, with their prisoner, all half frozen, dead beat, and nearly starved, came within view from the gates. The ditch was half full of ice, solid as a rock, but the heart of the sentry was all aglow to behold them at a distance, and his jubilant call, “Corporal of the guard!” reached them as they struggled across the intervening spaces with the grateful realization that they were not to be kept waiting for identification, while the last resources of endurance gave way at the moment of rescue and the portal of refuge.

A clangor of weapons, keen and clear on the icy air, the tramp of marching feet, the glitter of steel and scarlet cloth, came to them through the great gate, following hard on the cry to turn out the guard. In less than five minutes the red glow of great fires, ardent spirits unsparingly administered, hot food, and the comforts of beds and blankets invested the recollection of the struggle through the snow, the tramp of more than two hundred miles, the dangers and vicissitudes of the journey with a certain unreality, seeming rather something they had wildly dreamed, were it not for the testimony of each to reinforce the memory of the others.

Exhaustion limited their capacity for expression, but the whole fort rejoiced in their stead. The news flew abroad like the flocks of snowbirds all undaunted by the temperature. The tale of the notable capture was told over and again in the guardroom, in the officers’ mess-room, in the barracks, and the farrier’s smithy; over the making of the clumsy cartridges of that day for the little cannon on the bastions, and around the mending of guns in the armorer’s forge; in the wigwams of the Indian hunters and camp followers of whatever sort whose temporary habitations were on the outside of the works; in the Cherokee town of Keowee, hard by, and at Jock Lesly’s trading-house. Even down into the depths of the earth to the Scotchman’s subterranean ingle-neuk it penetrated, and there it found Lilias sitting on a buffalo rug before the red fire, her hands clasped tightly, her eyes wildly dilated, pale to the lips, and with her heart fluttering frantically, painfully, hopelessly, like one of the many birds perishing without, whose wings, swift though they were, had beat futilely against the infinite forces of destiny embodied in the storm; for she--and she only--saw aught beyond cause of gratulation in the capture of the turbulent French emissary, the destroyer of the peace of the frontier, the arch-plotter, the organizer of Indian armies, the reconciler of Indian feuds, the confederator of all Indian tribes into one great united, potent structure of government financed and armed through Spanish and French aid, before which British colonial occupation could hardly stand for a day.

“Callum took the man! It was Callum, and he maun hae the credit!” Jock Lesly jubilantly declared as he sat rubbing his hands by the fire, his snowy match-coat sending up a steam as the drifts melted from it, for he was just returned from the fort. “Captain Howard is as gleg as a grig! He hae won his majority by this bit o’ wark, I mak nae dout!”

“What will be the Frenchman’s name?” demanded Lilias, her lips dry as she stared, dismayed, startled, forlorn, into the fire.

“A-weel--a-weel--hinny, and that’s the curious part of it! It’s that Tam Wilson, the loon we nursed clear of the fever! And I misdoubts it’s misprision o’ treason, or some o’ thae unchancy crimes--only we kenned naught aboot him!” And Jock Lesly’s rich rollicking laughter filled the room.

“He helped us out o’ the kentry, an’ kep’ Moy Toy frae takin’ our scalps!” she replied reproachfully.

Jock Lesly paused to look down at her gravely, his big eyes round. “Hout, fie!” he ejaculated. “Ony French chiel protect _me_! An’ frae auld Moy Toy, that I have foregathered wi’ ever since the kentry was built! Mair likely he spirited up the chief to trouble us an’ to burn my tradin’-house an’ a’ my gear! It seems to me I jaloosed su’thin’ o’ the sort at ane time! Na, na, Lilias; if he helped us at a’, it was lest our murder hurt the French interest an’ set the British at the Injuns afore the chiels were ready for their bluidy wark.”

She gazed, deeply serious, at the fire. She too thought this more than likely, in the light of what she had known earlier, and knew more certainly now. She gave a long sigh of pity for the captive; but these were the fortunes of war that every soldier must needs risk, and with which women had no concern.

“Na, bairn, na!” her father boasted. “Auld Jock Lesly can tak care o’ his ain, an’ hae dune it this mony a day! He needna hae Tam Wilson cluttered up wi’ heed o’ him an’ his! But, lass!” he broke into a roar of jovial laughter, “to see up yon at the fort the major--hegh, sirs, it’s for luck that I suld sae miscall the captain--ter see him gloat ower Everard. He canna be quit o’ glorifying that he tuk him in sae hard a measure when Everard had him like a bird in a trap.”

“What for did Lieutenant Everard let him slip?” she asked, turning her head upward to look at her father’s face.

“A fule needs no reason, lass, for bein’ a fule, but he wadna believe Callum, because the lad could urge naething except that the man spoke French--which Callum himsel’ can do, though that wad never prove him a toad.”

“An’ how is it that this captain was sae muckle wiser?” persisted Lilias. “Lieutenant Everard is a finer lookin’ man than Captain Howard, an’ his hair curls amaist as weel as mine.”

“Oh, ho!” shouted Jock Lesly, smiting his thigh in the fervor of his relish, “that only proves he has the better thatch, not the bigger house! A-weel, now--a-weel--ilka man suld hae his due! ’Twas not till lately--an’ Lieutenant Everard was gone--that Callum learned for _sure_ that the man is French,--for you see the fallow himsel’,--and he is a fule too, for all his hair curls,--he tauld a woman that he is French and gave her his name and employ, and the woman tauld Callum! My certie, in ilka mischief there’s aye a woman at wark!” Then with a changed note, “Hegh, Lilias!” he exclaimed sharply.

For Lilias, screaming, had sprung to her feet. It was she--and she saw it now--who had delivered him bound and helpless into the hands of his enemy! She cared not for him now as Tam Wilson, but for the awful responsibility she had taken. Her habitual candor was beaten back upon her lips by the untoward effects of her recent disclosure. She restrained with difficulty the child-like impulse to reveal the mystery to her father, who was alarmed, amazed, agitated. She protested that the fire had burned her, flinging out a spark, and demanded peevishly why he must needs be always sending such crackling and splitting varieties of wood to their hearth in the cave-house. With wisps of his frowzy light hair falling over his florid face as he bent his head, he was presently stepping about to find the blazing splinter in the buffalo rug, and although he now and again desisted, with the comment “A-weel, it will no set _this_ biggin’ in a low!” he shortly, with the force of habit, commenced the search anew.

It was the custom of Lilias to avoid the trading-house, for she was more fastidious and exacting than her simple opportunities might seem to imply. But Jock Lesly was by no means poor, and it had been his delight to lavish such luxuries as in his limited apprehension he accounted desirable upon his only child, and thus she had been reared in a degree beyond her station. To-day, however, she was here, there, and everywhere, listening to the loud jocular comments of a few of the soldiers from the fort, who were now and again in the store and disposed to talk of the capture. The transition thence was obviously to gossip about the prisoner. A hearty, well-favored lad he was, so they understood from the detail that had captured him. He had given them little trouble, and they liked him well. He was a proper lad and active afoot, and bore the hardships of the march finely. They hardly knew what to do with him at the fort till he could be sent forward to Charlestown. They thought Captain Howard himself was puzzled as to the method of his disposition. Certainly,--in reply to a question from Jock Lesly,--military prisoners, that is, French officers, had been in times past kept in the hospital, and giving their parole had been permitted occasionally the freedom of the parade ground. This fellow, however, was captured out of uniform and without ostensible military employ, and would be held as a civil prisoner, though they had him now hard and fast in the guard-house. The talk of peace negotiations with France would do him no good,--the stirrer-up of savages on the frontier, just subdued by the English at so great a cost of blood and treasure, and at peace with the colonies, would never lack for a charge in Charlestown that would stick. He would be accused of murders, and of the instigation of those massacres that had already violated the peace negotiated with the Cherokees. And then one of the soldiers passed his hand across his throat with an ugly gesture, rolled up his eyes with a leer, and gave a click of the tongue inexpressibly loathsome, at which, unaccountably, they all laughed.

Lilias, hovering about among the swaying fabrics depending from the beams, turned sick and faint. She it was who had done this, in her foolish inadvertence thinking that all was now known to Callum,--she, who had the man’s secret that she had promised never to tell--nay, he had voluntarily trusted himself to her honor!

Her face was drawn and white. The chill of the day was in her heart. As one of the Indians whisked a hand mirror into which he was gazing with gurgling rapture at his hideous countenance, she caught sight of her own reflection, so wan, so appealing, so agonized, that she braced her nerves anew that her face might not betray her grief, although she felt at the end and hoped naught.

A number of the braves of the Muscogee escort who had participated in the march subsequent to the capture of the prisoner had repaired, although exhausted and half drunk, to the trading-house as inevitably as the needle to the pole, and were engaged in delightedly rummaging such of its trifles as were accessible. They were meeting with special welcome at Fort Prince George, at the officers’ quarters, the barracks, the kitchen, the trading-house being generously treated, their services having proved available in so serious an emergency. Naturally with such subjects, their instinct was to impose upon this disposition, and to magnify the obligations it betokened.

“Haud a care, Dougal,” Jock Lesly charged the under-trader. “Thae chiels covet ilka bawbee’s worth in the house, an’ Providence permittin’ I suld like fine to save the roof!”

Perhaps it was this absorption that caused him to be more oblivious of Lilias to-day than usual, though even in its midst he had a heedful notice of her. “Hegh, lass,” he stopped her once in passing, “but ye hae a’ the snaw in your face the day, an’ your bonny blue e’en are a wee dreary. I misdoots the climate here wi’ a’ its changes an’ cantrips isna suited to ye like Charlestoun. Gae doun to the fire in the ha’ house; it’s warmer there.”

When she quitted the trading-house he did not know. She was all alone, attended only by the old collie, who would not be driven back, although she childishly pinched his ears and pulled his tail and put him to all the pain she could. Her visit to the fort was a very distinct surprise to Captain Howard and contravened his impressions of her hitherto. Being a man of about forty-five years of age, and having daughters of his own far away, he entertained rather strict ideas of the becoming in maidenly conduct. It may have been her own natural dignity, or the arrogance of a girl reared beyond her station, or the indifference of one perceiving the raw material of suitors apparently inexhaustible in the garrisons of the frontier, but she had been hitherto somewhat unapproachable by the men at the post, averse to those of the ruder social level of her father’s daughter, and suspicious and cold to those above. Therefore when she cast upon Captain Howard a smile, the radiance of which might have thawed out all Fort Prince George, he was mystified and expectant.

Her first words, however, put him at ease as he sat at the table in the orderly room with an ensign opposite and two or three noncommissioned officers with their reports standing at attention.

“I’m fu’ glad to catchit you at your wark, Captain,” she said with her most dulcet intonation, swaying the half open door, and looking against the snowy expanse of the parade without like some clear fine painting on a pearly surface. “I wad like ill to harry ye out o’ your hour o’ ease, wi’ a’ thae bodies,” she glanced about at the orderlies and the sentry and a squad of men outside, “to weigh sae heavy on your mind.”

She hesitated as she stood in her puce-colored serge skirt, from which the snow dripped, a heavy red rokelay thrown around her, and one of those “screens,” half shawl, half veil, worn by women in the lowlands as well as the highlands of Scotland, brought over her head in the muffling manner usual in wintry weather. Beneath its loosened folds her golden hair, her pink and white dimpled face, her glittering teeth and red lips, showed captivatingly, and Captain Howard must have been something more than military and human had he not offered her a chair.

“I canna sit, for I hinna a moment,” she replied, but she came toward the fire, and an orderly, mindful of the blast, promptly shut the door as she relinquished her hold upon it. “I wad hae sent somebody, but thae chiels of Injuns are fair crowding out the packmen at the trading-house, and my daddy winna spare a man to leave there till the Muscogees are far awa’--twal mile or more.”

Her eyes twinkled alluringly, in ridicule of auld Jock’s thrifty bent, and Captain Howard smiled responsively.

“Sae fur the lack of a better messenger I maun e’en do my ain errand. You see, Captain,”--she leaned against the back of a chair, and he opposite, having taken a seat with the anticipation of her acceptance of his proffer, gazed at her expectantly,--“the soldiers are making much o’ Callum, an’ my daddy is looking after the Muscogees, an’ I was minded to consider that naebody is like to care much for the prisoner. So knowin’ you hinna too much beddin’ gear at the fort, an’ the weather bein’ freakish cauld, I thought I wad roll up a blanket or twa an’ some furs for the creatur’s bed.”

He was surprised for a moment, vaguely suspicious, doubtful.

“Just for a loan, ye maun understand,” she stipulated primly. “When the weather breaks I sall look to hae them a’ again.”

This thrifty afterthought was so characteristic of Jock Lesly and his household that the officer’s mind instantly cleared. He remembered previous instances of such thoughtfulness on her part, but manifested then toward the hospital. Indeed in a passing illness he had himself been the pleased recipient of wine whey, arrowroot gruel, mulled port, chocolate, and calves’ foot jelly.

He hastened to express his appreciation of the timeliness of her offering. “The usual arrangements are somewhat scant for such weather, and I have no doubt it is needed. The guard-house prison has no fire, and it must be pretty chilly there, though there is a great chimney in the next room.”

“Will ye no look at the gear?” She produced from under her cloak a bundle compactly made up, from the edges of which otter fur showed.

The officer politely waived the precaution.

“Not at all necessary.” Then somewhat wearied with these details, which the fairest face could not commend for indefinite contemplation,--at least to one having attained forty-five years,--“Will you be so good as to give them to the orderly? Nevins, take them to the guard-house.”

But Lilias, turning upon the advancing soldier, clasped her bundle in a closer clutch. “I’m no sae clear that the prisoner-body will e’er see them--an’ sall I get them a’ again? Thae bit duds are unco gude,” she added, as if loath to part from them.

The soldier reddened to the eyebrows under this imputation, and the officer, disillusioned of his admiration by this crafty, untimely, ignoble, unfounded suspiciousness, sought to rid himself of the whole affair.

“Take them yourself to the prisoner, then, and count them before leaving them, so that you may be sure of having them all returned. Baker, see to it that the sentry at the guard-house passes her.”

As she went out, “‘Aye be getting and aye be having,’” he quoted, “a chip of the old block.” He said this as if to himself, but aloud, partly to assuage the lacerated feelings of the man whom he had called Nevins, and as if her suspiciousness were not a personal flout, but merely appertained to the cautious thrift of her canny Scotch nature.

The guard had turned out upon the advance from the woods of a considerable body of Indians, who, however, proved to be only neighboring tribesmen without organization, but eager and curious concerning the excitements at the fort, of which they had heard in the adjacent Cherokee town of Keowee. They were not to be permitted to enter, as they evidently desired, but their pertinacity to this end detained the officer of the guard for a few minutes, while he sought to pacify them by giving them authentic details on those points about which they were most inquisitive. Meantime the guard, lined up, stood in a glittering rank of scarlet and steel on the snowy spaces just in front of the gate.

The guardroom was thus empty when Lilias, admitted by the sentry at the outer door of the building, made her way with hasty, disordered steps through the apartment. She hesitated at the inner door for an instant, not recognizing the beating of her own heart, which at first she mistook for some turbulent alarum outside, drumming the whole garrison to arms. The next moment she plunged into the room, and there was Tam Wilson! oh puir Tam Wilson! so pinched, so blue, so cold, sitting in this frostbound cell, with his head upon the table, and his face in his hands,--all his plans congealed in this hard freeze of fate and dead like other transient blooms of the year under the snow.

As he looked up at the sound of her step, he recognized her upon the instant. A faint wan smile quivered in his face. He was about to speak, but she laid her finger warningly upon her lips. Then with one hasty glance at the closed door behind her, she tore her bundle open and rushed at him. She had another skirt such as she herself wore--of brown serge, but little to choose between the shades--and slipped it over his head in one moment. Then as she vainly sought to make her slender waistband meet about his middle, although he too was slim, she commented in a whisper, “My certie! to be built like a cask! I’ll een pin it in the plaits, but it will no hing straight in the hem!” She doffed her red cloak to throw it about him; her screen was on his head, and realizing her intention, he could but kiss her hands as she adjusted it under his chin, muffling his face and shoulders as she had herself worn it, and taking the precaution to pin it here and there. “For ye’ll get it aff afore ye are to the woods if I dinna haud a care; an’ once in the woods by the river ye’ll find under that big crag a canoe, an’ below the seat a gude store of food an’ wine. An’ to Charlestoun, lad, straight down the Keowee River and the Savannah an’ out to sea! Some French ship will tak ye up, I mak nae doubt. The pursuit will set the other way--to the Cherokee country.”

“And you?”

“Never fear! I’ll bide here--safe--amang my friends. Walk like me if ye can; but be aff, callant, if ye luve your life!”

She sank into his chair; and mercurial though he was, he could scarcely take up the rôle with the spirit with which she had laid it down. As he opened the door into the guardroom he saw that the soldiers had not yet returned. He barely glanced at the sentry whom he passed on the outer step; and although the notice of the soldier was but the casual attention of recognition and expectation, he felt the man’s look as if it had been red-hot steel laid on a tender nerve. He walked down slowly into the snow, blessing its depth that should make any eccentricity of gait, except a long stride, seem the incident of its impeding medium. In meeting the guard halfway returning from the gate, he had but to mince modestly along, not lifting his eyes, the screen drawn quite over his face; and since Miss Lilias was an uncommonly tall woman and the Frenchman of but medium height, the difference was not immediately apparent.

A sudden swift rush behind him just before he reached the gate--that great envious portal that barred him from all his world, from safety, from life itself--and he felt that he must drop here in the snow and die, if so happy a fate as a death thus he might crave.

He had not had time to cry aloud in terror, in nervous stress, in absolute despair, when the pursuing presence whizzed past, then returning, leaped and fawned and wheezed about him with such evident blissful recognition that if Miss Lilias Lesly had no other point of identification to the eye of the sentry it would have been supplied in the jovial manner of her companion, the faithful old collie. The soldier presented arms as her semblance passed, to which extravagant compliment the figure returned a bow of marked courtesy, and then followed over the snow the frantically bounding collie, that was fairly frenzied with joy to see and recognize anew, despite his feminine frippery of attire, his friend of auld lang syne, Tam Wilson; for the instinct of the collie was not so limited an endowment as the intelligence of the sentry and the main guard.

XXI

IN her after life Lilias often reviewed her sentiments as she sat there in the blue cold, with that curious suggestion of grit in the air common to a low temperature, the repulsion to the dust of the place more pronounced and apparent to the sensitive finger-tips than if it were summer. She had wrapped herself in the otter-fur mantle that she had carried in view of the relinquishment of her red rokelay to the fugitive. Presently she put both feet on the rungs of the chair and crouched forward like some tiny animal, her golden hair barely glimpsed beneath the light brown tints of the fur. Sometimes she put her blue hands to her mouth to feel how chill they were, and blew her warm breath upon them; then again she clenched the trembling fingers and drew her mantle closer. How cold it was! How had he endured it! It might be colder still on the river, but he was speeding toward freedom, and there was genial warmth in the mere suggestion. How cruel men were to each other! And he was but obeying the behests of his government, as Captain Howard regarded as sacred every scrawl that reached him from headquarters.

Now and again the sounds from the guardroom caught her attention,--a tramp of feet with a measured swinging gait, a snatch of song, and presently a droning deep voice going on and on, as one should say for an hour or more, with but little interruption, telling a long story.

How cold it was! how cold! She wondered how long she could sustain it. The longer she sat here in her wrap of otter fur the farther he would be on his way down the Keowee River. If only she could know that he had made good his escape! that she had atoned for the dreadful evil she had wrought in revealing his secret! Then indeed she would be happy! In liberating him, she argued, she had promoted no massacre of women and children. If aught that he had planned threatened them it was frustrated, for he was off and on his way out of the country, and she had aided his flight, nay, made it possible. If only she could know that he had won the river bank and found the canoe! Down and down the Savannah he would paddle the canoe, and a man in buckskins, the usual garb of the country,--for he would soon doff the woman’s habiliments,--would attract no attention from casual observers on the banks; and some night--some dark night soon--he would float out of Charlestown harbor, and finally be picked up by some French man-of-war or merchantman, so many there were then in the southern waters. The pursuit would undoubtedly take head in the opposite direction. Few would imagine it safer to flee directly toward the enemy’s stronghold rather than from it. They would follow him back into the Indian country, where he had friends, influence, the French prestige--a thousand reasons to command succor and concealment. But to Charlestown--into the lion’s mouth? In this instance the lion slept with his mouth open. Somehow she was sure no one would think of this resource but herself. She would give him all the time she could, a good start ahead of all possible pursuit. Six hours it might be, if she could so long endure the cruel cold, before the noise of his escape should be bruited abroad. The noonday meal was just concluded. The British soldier was presumed to eat no supper; at least, only two meals were furnished him, except on the frontier, where to content him the better, perhaps, on the theory that the road to his heart lay through his stomach, a third was served. This came a little before the hour of retreat. She wondered if the prisoners shared in this extra refection. She had an idea that then at all events she must needs call in the guard; she would be able to endure it no longer.

As she sat crouching and still in the only chair of the bleak and bare apartment, her attention was attracted by a crystalline tinkle against the glass of the window. She thought it must be snowing afresh. Presently she rose, stood upon the chair, for the window was exceedingly high, to be out of the reach of any enterprising prisoner, and then she stepped noiselessly upon the table. Looking upward through the grimy glass she could see the whirl of dizzy flakes against the sky. A tumultuous storm it was. A man fleeing through it would be invisible. It would render pursuit impracticable, so long as it should continue. Her heart gave a great throb of triumph. The afternoon was wearing on. The light was dulling fast, and unless a barricade of ice should impede the flow of the river these few hours’ start would mean freedom to a man fleeing for his life!

Reassured, invigorated, she stepped slowly, softly down from the table to the chair, and then from the chair to the floor. She seated herself anew in silence, in loneliness, muffled to her eyebrows in her otter furs, and listening to the gay snatches of song about the great flaring hearth in the guardroom.

And it was cold, it was very cold!

During the afternoon Jock Lesly decided to tramp over to the fort. He had a desire to compare views with Captain Howard and expatiate on the incident of the capture, so full of import to them both,--to the soldier as representing the military element, and the trader the mercantile interests of the post. He had scarcely stretched out his smoking boots to the fire, seated in the officer’s comfortable quarters, than Captain Howard introduced the subject of the weather in reference to the prisoner, intending to thank the trader for the consideration he had manifested in sending blankets to the fort, in view of the arctic temperature.

“We ought to consider our obligations to the helpless,” said the officer, “but, as far as I am concerned, Gad, sir, I’m kept so short for funds that it is often like letting a faithful soldier and servant of the king go cold in order to house and blanket and warm some miscreant enemy to the whole community.”

“Ou, aye, weel,” said auld Jock, a trifle out of countenance, “I’m obleeged for your sarmon, sir. D’ye mean ye think I ought to blanket an’ mainteen the king’s prisoners at bed an’ board?”

“No, oh no,” exclaimed the officer. “I only meant to thank you for the blankets and furs and so on that your daughter brought over to-day, kindly bethinking herself of the likelihood that the prisoner would be neglected. In truth we have been surprisingly short, and if the soldiers were not young and strong and had not a good deal of red blood in their veins, I should expect to hear that some of them had frozen stiff.”

“Wow, man, to be plain, I never heard o’ thae blankets afore!” Jock Lesly confessed. “The lassie helpit her nainsel’, as she has a perfect right to do, and I sall ne’er say her nay. All my gear an’ hoardings will be hers ane day. An’ I doubt not she’ll find some feckless ne’er-do-weel of a husband ter fling it a’ awa’. But it’s hers, it’s a’ hers. I wark for nane else, but,” with an anxious pause and a keen glance, “did ye notice whether it was the lamb’s wool or the yowe’s wool blankets that the bairn had?”

“I did not see them at all,” said the officer hastily. “I only assured her that she should have them all back safe, and bade her distribute them to her own satisfaction.”

Jock Lesly rose to his feet. This was a topic on which he could not rest in uncertainty. She might give away the blankets as she would, but his curiosity as to which quality she had seen fit to take actually burned him. He presently went tramping across the parade, and Captain Howard, looking after him smilingly, little dreamed of the errand that was to bring him back again.

The dull dreary evening, with the snow still dizzily whirling, was closing in. Indeed but for the ghastly illumination of the reflection from the snow on the ground, it would now be dark. The peaked roof of the trading-house looming up among the flakes before Jock Lesly knew that he was near it, so stanchly he strode through the deep drifts, was of a benignant aspect to his mind, and he loved it. As he sounded a whistle, that Duncan or Dougal or whatever henchman awaited his coming should perceive his arrival and admit him to the domestic fortress, he noticed how the smoke was flaring up from that flue of the chimney devoted to the hearth so craftily hidden below. His heart warmed at the thought of his ingleside in his subterranean home.

“I hinna seen my bairn a’ the day but by a wee gliff here awa’ an’ there awa’. If the lassie were in Charlestoun now I couldna believe it,” he said to himself as he heard the clatter of the bars falling within. “I’ll mak her sing some o’ thae auld sangs the nicht, when her voice sounds sae like her mither’s, an’ then me an’ the gillie-packmen an’ Luckie Meg will a’ sing the chorus an’ drink some flip. An’ it can snaw an’ sleet, an’ the wind can blaw an’ bleat, an’ awa’ doun there by the red ingle-neuk we’se never ken it at a’.”

Nevertheless when he was inside and the door secured anew, he said to the under-trader, who stood swinging the lantern, “Dougal, whilk o’ thae bales o’ blankets did Miss Lilias open the morn,--the lamb’s wool or the yowe’s wool? An’ how mony did she send to the fort?”

Dougal Micklin opened his eyes wide. “Neither the ane nor the t’ other!” he exclaimed jealously. “An’ what for suld she send blankets to the fort?”

But Jock Lesly would not believe this. Had he not the word of the recipient of her bounty, that is the commandant of the fort,--and he truly thought that Howard must have suggested it!--that she had given him the trader’s blankets to wrap up his prisoner?

“For whether it’s the lamb’s wool or the yowe’s wool, they are baith verra gude, and ower gude to be given awa’ gratis,” Jock Lesly argued. “For sic-like emergencies we brought them out frae Carolina, not for the summer time! We forecast that cauld weather might catch thae carles at the fort without kiver, and Captain Howard might buy them, not beg them. He is the commandant of his majesty’s fort, not a gaberlunzie man! It’s his bounden duty, even suld it cost him a wee penny o’ thae short funds he bleats about, to protect his captives frae suffering frae the inclement weather as a humane man, and as a commandant it’s in the reg’lar way o’ business. I never heard o’ sic a request onless it was made o’ Providence. We’se a’ ask Providence for _onything_,--even to forgie us our debts that we made oursel’s,--an’ I’ll be bound Captain Howard wad say, ‘Forgie us our debts, _an’ interest on same_!’”

He began to laugh satirically, then became suddenly silent, for as the lantern swung before a row of shelves, the light revealed the blankets in question, duly baled, with not a cord cut nor a fold shaken out.

He did not wait for the under-trader to complete a laudatory account of them, upon which Dougal had launched out as if he sought to sell them to auld Jock himself, but which was purely mechanical, declaring that they were of a fine quality and a heavy weight and could not be had cheaper in Charlestown, notwithstanding the great expense of carriage to the trader; that they were no designed for the Indian trade but for such gentles as might--

“Be at the fort an’ afeard o’ freezin’,” interrupted Jock Lesly sardonically. “But thae gentles would rather warm their taes at a guinea than in a blanket that they have to pay for, man! ‘Forgie us interest on same!’” And down Jock Lesly went upon the rungs of his ladder and into his ain ha’ house.

Very cheerful it looked. The supper was already on the board, the hearth swept, and the fire flaring. The little flax-wheel at which Lilias sat so often at night was at one side, silent and motionless, and great buffalo-skins lay before the hearth. No lamp glowed from the little chamber beyond, and Jock Lesly stopped short at the sight of the black darkness within.

“Where is Miss Lilias, Luckie?” he asked of old Meg, busied in brewing the tea.

“I dinna ken,” she replied casually; then looking up, she added, “In the tradin’-house maist likely. She has been flittin’ in an’ out a’ the day, except for the last twa hours or sae.”

“There is not a soul in the trading-house!” cried Jock Lesly, with a sudden cold clutch at his heart.

Snatching a candle from the table he quickly searched her little chamber, the passage, the anteroom, all in vain! It was but a small place after all, this ha’ house, and easily traversed.

Then he called her, his great rich resonant voice sounding from ceiling to floor, from wall to wall, evoking a train of echoes, and alack with so grievous a tremor in it that in listening the tears could but start. The gillies, the under-trader had scoured every nook and cranny in the trading-house and found naught. They looked at each other with white scared faces, each repeating in astonishment at intervals, as if they could not credit the marvel, “She isna here! She isna here!”

Jock Lesly, with an awful sense of responsibility, thought of his wife, dead so long ago,--had he thus discharged the sacred trust of the care of their only child!

There was not a moment to be lost, although perhaps hours had already been wasted. Jock Lesly’s stanch courage rallied to meet the emergency. All his life hereafter he might expend in grief, but the present belonged to Lilias, and every force it could compass should be consecrated to her service. He plunged through the whirl of snow, still falling in the dense darkness; the tears that had poured unrestrained, unheeded, shed unconsciously down his white cheeks, froze upon them, and tiny icicles trembled upon his eyelashes. But he did not sob; his breath held steady; his teeth were set, his every nerve was tense, controlling his great physical strength that it might better seize any opportunity of her rescue. The under-trader distinctly remembered having seen her early in the afternoon returning from the fort and walking with her collie toward the river. The collie had since reached home, and with this testimony that she was no longer in the securities of Fort Prince George they gathered the little group of packmen about them in a close squad, and looking grimly to the priming of their pistols they forcibly searched the Muscogee camp just outside the works, thinking those troublous half-drunken wights might have intercepted her as she came from the fort with the intention of holding her for ransom when the terror at her disappearance should be at the maximum.

Although taken by surprise and obviously astounded by the accusation, the Muscogees could furnish no information, and their camp betrayed not a trace of her presence. This hope dashed, the party followed successively every glimmering _ignis fatuus_ of a possibility that each could suggest; one remembered that a settler’s wife had a child named in compliment “Lilias,” and as it was suddenly ill and near to death, she might have visited it; another recounted the fact that an old Indian woman near Keowee fascinated her with antiquated fables, which she valued and loved to hear; another, upheld by superstition, insisted on repairing to Keowee to consult the cheerataghe and have them work a spell to reveal her whereabouts; and while this was in progress Jock Lesly required the headmen to search the town and the adjacent series of Cherokee habitations, once almost consecutive, from Kulsage (Sugar Town), about a mile above and even at that time extending far down the valley, toward the site of Sinica, burned by the British during the Cherokee War. Hours passed in these fruitless efforts, and at last, when each lure had finally flickered out in the darkness of despair, Jock Lesly turned again as a final hope to the fort. He would consult the last man who saw her there, the sentry at the gate, for perchance she might have expressed to him some inkling of her intention to go elsewhere than home. The gillies all eager, zealous, plunging through the drifts followed him; now and again they fell over the submerged stumps of the clearing and wandered out of their course and far afield, but Jock Lesly as if by instinct avoided every impediment, and albeit the whirl of flakes obscured all intimation of that blended glimmer and hazy aureola that were wont to mark the site of the fort by night, he reached the gate as unerringly as if the bastions, the barracks, the flag on the tower of the block-house were flaunting in the bold light of day.

None was so swift as he of all the light young fellows, but a moment after the sentry’s challenge rang upon the chill night air he heard the ice of the broad moat crack with a great splash, as Duncan, mistaking the direction of the gate, fell into the frozen water of the ditch, and much splutter and torrid exclamations as he scrambled out. The noise attracted the attention of the sentinel in the tower of the block-house, and the sharp report of his musket, as he fired a warning into the air, brought out the main-guard before the corporal could reach the sentry at the gate.

In another moment there was a great commotion upon the parade, erstwhile so dark and silent. A shifting of lanterns here and there threw long cone-shaped shafts of light down the snowy expanse, illuminating in limited sections a log building near at hand, with its drift-laden eaves and window-sills, and all the atmosphere a silent, palpitating mysterious motion as the flakes still whirled. The glitter of the scarlet and steel of the armed guard, its expectant aggressive mien, its quick tramp and alert bearing might seem to offer a sort of reassurance with its note of ready confidence. And indeed Jock Lesly’s hope revived, albeit the jaunty military manner of the young officer of the day was at variance with his anxious intent troubled face, revealed by the lantern held aloft that he might descry his visitor’s care-worn white lineaments.

“Help you to find a trace? See the last man who saw her? That must be the sentry at the gate--and the next, the prisoner himself.”

As to learn from the officer of the guard the name of the sentinel who had been posted at the gate at that hour and since relieved was a work of more or less time, the interval could obviously be employed in interrogating the prisoner himself as to the possible intimations of her immediate intentions that Lilias might have expressed when she quitted his cell. The permission of the commandant would be necessary,--but here suddenly was the commandant himself, roused from sleep by the stir, and with his voice kind and reassuring.

“Never fear, dear fellow,” he said, passing his arm fraternally through the quaking Lesly’s, “we’ll find her if we have to search the Indian country inch by inch. They’ll never dare to harm her, for they will hold her for ransom. I can feel for you, for have I not two daughters of my own?”

But as they strode together through the guardroom, with its flaring fire and its tramping, thronging, military inmates, and opened the inner door to the dark and chill military prison beyond, Captain Howard’s sentiments fell far the other side of friendly, for there, her golden head pillowed on the hard table, her mantle of otter fur drawn close about her ears, her feet perched upon the rung of the chair, sat fast asleep the trader’s daughter, while the great flakes of snow jingled crystalline and keen against the glass of the window, and the dark hours merged deep into the mid-glooms of the night.

And Captain Howard’s valuable prisoner was gone! His prisoner--whom valiant men had risked their lives to secure. His prisoner--whom hundreds of miles of cruel forced marches, privations incredible, and dangers unnumbered had brought at last to his door. His prisoner--whom other commanders had tried in vain to take, for whose capture many other plans of specious wiles had failed and fallen short. His prisoner--on whose triumphant delivery to the military and civil authorities in Charlestown his majority depended. This prisoner--gone, gone! And in his stead, in his secure cell with not a bar broken, not a sentry bribed, no vigilance relaxed, was a girl, just awakened, half frozen, all bewildered and beginning to cry.

Jock Lesly caught the officer’s first outburst of dismay and surprise and rage as a man might a blow, putting up his arm to guard his face.

“Hegh, Captain,” he said, his hand clasping the girl’s as she cowered and blinked before the light that coldly fell upon the bare walls, the high window, the dusty floor, all infinitely bleak and gloomy. “I’se gae nae furder in a’ this gear! Let but the bairn get to the fire! I confess! I’m bound to confess! My heart can haud sic a care o’ deceit nae langer! ’Twas me that planned to liberate the callant! I sent the lassie here to win ye by a trick an’ to turn him loose drest in sic gear as hers an’ to tak his place. ’Twas _me_, Captain, an’ I surrender!”

Great as were the variant urgencies of the situation, the cold coerced the group mechanically toward the fire in the guardroom, and they stood on the broad hearth, the soldiers withdrawing a few paces to give them space. The glittering muskets had been all stacked anew; the open door showed a broad lane of light gleaming down the snowy parade outside, the flakes still madly whirling. Captain Howard in his hastily assumed military uniform, with his ungartered hose wrinkled and loose, and evidently unconscious that he still wore a red flannel nightcap with a queer tassel, had a touch of the grotesque, in contrast with the dapper perfection of the ensign’s regimentals with his up-all-night expectation as officer of the day. All looked in dismay, in growing anger, in gathering doubt at Jock Lesly.

The trader stanchly returned their gaze. The shoulders of his great match-coat were covered with snow, which was beginning to drip as it thawed with the heat of the fire, and he held pressed close to his side his golden-haired daughter. She was fully awake now, and looking out with alert, wide-eyed expectation from her mantle of otter fur drawn partially over her head.

“Jock Lesly,” cried the captain, “you are lying! Why should you, always a loyal subject, with the interest of your trade dependent upon the preservation of the peace with the Cherokees, set free this turbulent Laroche, this stirrer-up of strife along the frontier?”

“Ou,--ay,” said Jock Lesly, holding up his chin and gazing about him speculatively as if he looked for his inspiration in the air, “a’ that is verra true; but this lad hae eat o’ my salt up in the Tennessee country, an’”--

“You are lying!” cried the officer angrily, “and if you were not, it would be as much as my life is worth to tell you so, even with my guard around me! You know, and I know, that the child did it of her own accord,--and for what, missy? Why did you liberate the man?”

“Ye’ll no ask the bairn questions, Captain Howard!” interposed Jock Lesly angrily. “I stand here ready to tak the responsibility an’ answer for the deed! The lassie is no accountable for what she says! She’s cauld, half starved! I surrender! I surrender! It’s no the lassie’s will that brought her here! I sent her! ’Twas me, her cruel father! She is cauld! I surrender! I”--

“I let the prisoner out!” said Lilias suddenly, and her voice rang in that grim guardroom like some sweet string of a harp, keyed so high above any vibrations to which it was accustomed, yet rich and resonant with its fullness of tone. “I let him out because he was betrayed by my word. I tauld Callum MacIlvesty that he was French, for he had avowed it to me; but I was thinkin’ then ’twas known to a’ the warld, an’ sae Callum MacIlvesty tauld you, Captain Howard, that he was no Tam Wilson, as Lieutenant Everard took him to be, but French, and ye sent to tak him. An’ now since I hae nae treachery to answer for,--for _I_’m no keeper o’ the guard-house here,--I’ll gae to gaol or where ye will wi’ a free heart. I care na for naught!”

She turned her face and golden head against her father’s great snowy coat as he once more futilely ejaculated, “The bairn’s cauld! it’s gey cauld weather! and she disna ken what she is sayin’!”

But Captain Howard, after an eager consultation aside with several officers of the garrison, summoned by the unusual commotion, and a survey of the conditions of the raging storm, returned to the questioning of Lilias.

“And at what time did this happen, mistress? What hour was it when you saw fit to turn the king’s prisoner loose upon the country?”

“Five minutes scant after you gave me leave to speak wi’ the callant; an’ after he was gone I stude the cauld as lang as I could, thinking to gie him a fair start, an’ then I drapped aff in a wee bit nap. It’s ower cauld comfort ye gie to your puir prisoners, Captain Howard.”

“And what direction did he take?” the officer asked eagerly.