IN WHICH I WHET MY FATHER’S SWORD

The summer day was all but spent when Richard Jennifer, riding express, brought me Captain Falconnet’s challenge.

’Twas a dayfall to be marked with a white stone, even in our Carolina calendar.  The sun, reaching down to the mountain-girt horizon in the west, filled all the upper air with the glory of its departing, and the higher leaf plumes of the great maples before my cabin door wrought lustrous patterns in gilded green upon a zenith background of turquoise shot with crimson, like the figurings of some rich old tapestries I had once seen in my field-marshal’s castle in the Mark of Moravia.

Beyond the maples a brook tinkled and plashed over the stones on its way to the near-by Catawba; and its peaceful brawling, and the evensong of a pair of clear-throated warblers poised on the topmost twigs of one of the trees, should have been sweet music in the ears of a returned exile.  But on that matchless bride’s-month evening of dainty sunset arabesques and brook and bird songs, I was in little humor for rejoicing.

The road made for the river lower down and followed its windings up the valley; but Jennifer came by the Indian trace through the forest.  I can see him now as he rode beneath the maples, bending to the saddle horn where the branches hung lowest; a pretty figure of a handsome young provincial, clad in fashions three years behind those I had seen in London the winter last past.  He rode gentleman-wise, in small-clothes of rough gray woolen and with stout leggings over his hose; but he wore his cocked hat atilt like a trooper’s, and the sword on his thigh was a good service blade, and no mere hilt and scabbard for show such as our courtier macaronis were just then beginning to affect.

Now I had known this handsome youngster when he was but a little lad; had taught him how to bend the Indian bow and loose the reed-shaft arrow in those happier days before the tyrant Governor Tryon turned hangman, and the battle of the Great Alamance had left me fatherless.  Moreover, I had drunk a cup of wine with him at the Mecklenburg Arms no longer ago than yesterweek—­this to a renewal of our early friendship.  Hence, I must needs be somewhat taken aback when he drew rein at my door-stone, doffed his hat with a sweeping bow worthy a courtier of the great Louis, and said, after the best manner of Sir Charles Grandison: 

“I have the honor of addressing Captain John Ireton, sometime of his Majesty’s Royal Scots Blues, and late of her Apostolic Majesty’s Twenty-ninth Regiment of Hussars?”

It was but an euphuism of the time, this formal preamble, declaring that his errand had to do with the preliminaries of a private quarrel between gentlemen.  Yet I could scarce restrain a smile.  For these upcroppings of courtier etiquette have ever seemed to march but mincingly with the free stride of our western backwoods.  None the less, you are to suppose that I made shift to match his bow in some fashion, and to say:  “At your service, sir.”