Now you may always count upon this failing in a cautious man, that at a crisis he is like to do the unwisest thing that offers.  This cutting out of Margery’s mare was none so vital a matter that I should have risked the marring of Ephraim Yeates’s plan upon it.  Yet having done this very thing, I must needs make a bad matter infinitely worse.

Instead of mounting to ride a charge through the camp, and so to draw the pursuit after me toward the cavern entrance, as I should, I slapped the mare to send her bounding through the guard line, snatched a saddle from its oak-branch peg to hurl it in the faces of the sentry group, and darting aside, plunged into the laurel thicket to come by running where I could and creeping where I must to that place where I had left Richard Jennifer.

All hot and exasperated as I was, ’twas something less than cooling to find Dick a-double on the ground, holding his sides and laughing like a yokel at his first pantomime.

“Oh, ho, ho! did you—­did you twig him, Jack?” he gasped.  “Saw you ever such a mincing puss-in-boots since the Lord made you?  Ah! ha! ha!”

“The devil take your ill-timed humor!” I cried.  “Up with you, man, and let us vanish while we may!”

By this the camp was in a pretty ferment, as you would guess—­our late captive having had space enough to tell his tale.  Drunk or sober, Falconnet was afoot and alert, shouting his orders to the Englishmen who were scrambling for their arms, and to the Indians who came swarming up from the lodges.

Whilst we looked, the Cherokees scattered like a company of trained gillies to beat us out of cover; and when the hunt was fairly up, the baronet-captain set his men in marching order to surround the wigwam of the captives.

As yet there was time for a swift retreat up the valley, or at least for the choosing of some battle-field of our own where the enemy need not outnumber us twenty to one; and again I urged Richard to bestir himself.  But it was the sight of Falconnet’s troopers deploying to surround the tepee-lodge, and not any word of mine, that broke his merriment in the midst.

At a bound he was up and handing me my sword.

“Good by, Jack; go you whilst you can.  You’ll be like to meet Eph and the Catawba coming in; turn them back and tell them to bide their time.”

“But you?” I would say.

“My place is inside of that soldier-cordon our friend is drawing about his dove-cote.  I shall be at hand when she needs me, as I promised.”

“Aye, so you may be; but not alone,” said I; and with that we fell to running like a pair of doubling foxes through the wood on the steep slope behind the lodge, striving with might and main to gain the laurel thicket whence we had made our first reconnaissance before the converging lines of the redcoat cordon should close and shut us out.

We did it by the skin of our teeth, diving to cover through the closing gap not a second too soon.  When we were in and hugging the bare ground under the scanty leafing of the laurel, I take no shame in saying that I would have given a king’s ransom to be at large again.  Had there been but one of us the covert would have been cramped enough; and I was painfully conscious that my borrowed coat of scarlet was but a poor thing to hide in.