My Son:

I know not if this will ever come into your hands, but it and my sword shall be left in trust with the faithful Darius.  We have made our ill-timed cast for liberty and it has failed, and to-morrow I and five others are to die at the rope’s end.  I bequeath you my sword—­’tis all the tyrant hath left me to devise—­and my blessing to go with it when you, or another Ireton, shall once more bare the true old blade in the sacred cause of liberty.

     Thy father,
          Roger Ireton.

You may be sure I conned these few brave words till I had them well by heart; and later, when my voice was surer and my eyes less dim, I summoned Darius and bade him tell me all he knew.  And it was thus I learned what I have here set down of my father’s end.

The next day, all indecision gone, I rode to Queensborough to ascertain, if so I might, how best to throw the weight of the good old Andrea into the patriot scale, meaning to push on thence to Charlotte when I had got the bearings of the nearest patriot force.

’Twas none so easy to learn what I needed to know; though, now I sought for information, a curious thing or two developed.  One was that this light-horse outpost in our hamlet was far in advance of the army of invasion—­so far that it was dangersomely isolated, and beyond support.  Another was the air of secrecy maintained, and the holding of the troop in instant readiness for fight or flight.

Why this little handful of British regulars should stick and hang so far from Lord Cornwallis’s main, which was then well down upon the Wateree, I could not guess.  But for the secrecy and vigilance there were good reasons and sufficient.  The patriot militia had been called out, and was embodying under General Rutherford but a few miles distant near Charlotte.

I had this information in guarded whispers from mine host of the tavern, and was but a moment free of the tap-room, when I first saw Margery Stair and so drank of the cup of trembling with madness in its lees.  She was riding, unmasked, down the high road, not on a pillion as most women rode in that day, but upon her own mount with a black groom two lengths in the rear.  I can picture her for you no better than I could for Richard Jennifer; but this I know, that even this first sight of her moved me strangely, though the witching beauty of her face and the proudness of it were more a challenge than a beckoning.

A blade’s length at my right where I was standing in front of the tavern, three redcoat officers lounged at ease; and to one of them my lady tossed a nod of recognition, half laughing, half defiant.  I turned quickly to look at the favored one.  He stood with his back to me; a man of about my own bigness, heavy-built and well-muscled.  He wore a bob-wig, as did many of the troop officers, but his uniform was tailor-fine, and the hand with which he was resettling his hat was bejeweled—­overmuch bejeweled, to my taste.