I went to see.  Margery rose at my approach, and even in the poor light I could see her draw herself up as if she would hold me at my proper distance.

“Your patient, Mistress Margery,—­We must mount and ride at once.  Is he fit?”

“No.”

“But we must be far to the eastward before daybreak.”

“I can not help it.  If you make him ride to-night you will finish what those cruel savages began, Captain Ireton.”

“We have little choice—­none, I should say.”

“Oh, you are bitter hard!” she cried, though wherein my offending lay just then I was wholly at a loss to know.

“’Tis your privilege to say so,” I rejoined.  “But as for making Dick ride, that will be but the kindest cruelty.  We are only a little way from the nearest Indian towns, and if the daylight find us here—­”

“Spare me,” she broke in; and with that she turned shortly and asked Ephraim Yeates to put her in her saddle.

Richard was still in the fever stupor, but he roused himself at my urging and let us set him upon his beast.  Once safe in the saddle, we lashed him fast like a prisoner, with a forked tree-branch at his back to hold him erect.  This last was the old hunter’s invention and ’twas most ingenious.  The forked limb, in shape like a Y, was set astride the cantle, with the lower ends thonged stoutly to Dick’s legs and to the girths.  Thus the upright stem of the inverted Y became an easy back-rest for the sick man; and when he was securely lashed thereto there was little danger for him save in some stumbling of the beast he rode.

When all was ready we had first to find our way down from the mountain top; and now even the old borderer and the Indian confessed their inability to do aught but retrace their steps by the only route they knew:  namely, by that ravine which we had twice traversed in daylight, and up which they had led the captured horses in the dusk.

This route promised all the perils of a gantlet-running, since by it we must take the risk of meeting the fleeing fugitives from the convoy camp, if the explosion had spared any fit to lift and carry the vengeance-cry.  But here again there was no alternative, and we set us in order for the descent, with Yeates and the Catawba ahead, the women and Dick in the midst, and her Apostolic Majesty’s late captain of hussars, masquerading as a British trooper, to bring on the rear.

Once in motion beneath the blue-black shadows of the pines, I quickly lost all sense of direction.  After we had ridden in wordless silence a short half hour or less, and I supposed we should be nearing the head of our descending ravine, our little cavalcade was halted suddenly in a thickset grove of the pines, and Ephraim Yeates appeared at my stirrup to say: 

“H’ist ye off your nag, Cap’n John, and let’s take a far’well squinch at the inimy whilst we can.”

“Where? what enemy?” I would ask, slipping from the saddle at his word.