’Twas a most heart-breaking business, getting the poor lad up that rock-ladder of escape in the darkness; for though I had come out of the fire with fewer burns than the roasting of me warranted, the battle preceding it had opened the old sword wound in my shoulder.  So, taking it all in all, I was but a short-breathed second to the faithful Catawba.

None the less, we tugged it through after some laborious fashion, and were glad enough when the steep ascent gave place to leveler going, and we could sniff the fragrance of the plateau pines and feel their wire-like needles under foot.

By this the shower cloud had passed and the stars were coming out, but it was still pitch black under the pines; so dark that I started like a nervous woman and went near to panic when a horse snorted at my very ear, and a voice, bodiless, as it seemed, said; “Well, now; the Lord be praised! if here ain’t the whole enduring—­”

What Ephraim Yeates would have said, or did say, was lost upon me.  For now my poor Dick’s strength was quite spent, and when the chief and I were easing him to lie full length upon the ground, there was a quick little cry out of the darkness, a swish of petticoats, and my lady darted in to fall upon Richard in a very transport of pity.

“Oh, my poor Dick! they have killed you!” she sobbed; “oh, cruel, cruel!” Then she lashed out at us.  “Why don’t you strike a light?  How can I find and dress his hurts in the dark?”

“Your pardon, Mistress Margery,” I said; “’tis only that the fever has overcome him.  He has no sore hurts, as I believe, save the fire-scorching.”

“A light!” she commanded; “I must have a light and see for myself.”

We had to humor her, though it was something against prudence.  Ephraim found dry punk in a rotten log, and firing it with the flint and steel of a great king’s musket—­one of his reavings from the enemy—­soon had a pine-knot torch for her.  She gave it to the Catawba to hold; and while she was cooing over her patient and binding up his burns in some simples gathered near at hand by the Indian, I had the story of the double rescue from the old hunter.

Set forth in brief, that which had come as a miracle to Dick and me figured as a daring bit of strategy made possible by the emptying of the Indian camp at our torture spectacle.

Yeates and the Catawba, following out the plan agreed upon, had come within spying distance while yet we were in the midst of that hopeless back-to-back battle, and had most wisely held aloof.  But later, when every Indian of the Cherokee band was busy at our torture trees, they set to work.

With no watch to give the alarm, ’twas easy to rifle the Indian wigwams of the firearms and ammunition.  The latter they threw into the stream; the muskets they loaded and trained over a fallen tree at the northern edge of the savanna, bringing them to bear pointblank upon the light-horse guard gathered again around the great fire.