At this William Campbell nodded to two of his Virginians, and I was searched forthwith, and that none too gently.  In the breast pocket of my hussar jacket they found that accursed duplicate despatch; the one I had taken from Tybee and which had so nearly proved my undoing in the interview with Major Ferguson.

Isaac Shelby opened and read the accusing letter and passed it around among his colleagues.

“I shall not ask you why this was undelivered, sir,” he said to me, sternly. “’Tis enough that it was found upon your person, and it sufficiently proves the truth of this gentleman’s accusation.  Have you aught further to say, Captain Ireton?—­aught that may excuse us for not leaving you behind us in a halter?”

Do you wonder, my dears, that I lost my head when I saw how completely the toils of this little black-clothed fiend had closed around me?  Twice, nay, thrice I tried to speak calmly as the crisis demanded.  Then mad rage ran away with me, and I burst out in yelling curses so hot they would surely dry the ink in the pen were I to seek to set them down here.

’Twas a silly thing to do, you will say, and much beneath the dignity of a grown man who cared not a bodle for his life, and not greatly for the manner of its losing.  I grant you this; and yet it was that same bull-bellow of soldier profanity that saved my life.  Whilst I was in the storm of it, cursing the lawyer by every shouted epithet I could lay tongue to, a miracle was wrought and Richard Jennifer and Ephraim Yeates pushed their way through the ever-thickening ring of onlookers; the latter to range himself beside me with his brown-barreled rifle in the hollow of his arm, and my dear lad to fling himself upon me in a bear’s hug of joyous recognition and greeting.

“Score one for me, Jack!” he cried.  “We were fair at t’other end of the mountain, and ’twas I told Eph there was only one man in the two Carolinas who could swear the match of that.”  Then he whirled upon my judges.  “What is this, gentlemen?—­a court martial?  Captain Ireton is my friend, and as true a patriot as ever drew breath.  What is your charge?”

Colonel Sevier, in whose command Richard and the old borderer had fought in the hilltop battle, undertook to explain.  I stood self-confessed as the bearer of despatches from Lord Cornwallis to Major Ferguson, he said, and I had claimed that the orders had been so altered as to delay the major’s retreat and so to bring on the battle.  But they had just found Lord Cornwallis’s letter in my pocket, still sealed and undelivered.  And the tenor of it was precisely opposite to that of an order calculated to delay the major’s march, as Mr. Jennifer could see if he would read it.

While Sevier was talking, the old borderer was fumbling in the breast of his hunting-shirt, and now he produced a packet of papers tied about with red tape.

“‘Pears to me like you Injun-killers from t’other side o’ the mounting is in a mighty hot sweat to hang somebody,” he said, as coolly as if he were addressing a mob of underlings.  “Here’s a mess o’ billy-doos with Lord Cornwallis’s name to ’em that I found ’mongst Major Ferguson’s leavings.  If you’ll look ’em over, maybe you’ll find out, immejitly if not sooner, that Cap’n John here is telling ye the plumb truth.”