“I say I know, and I do, Jack.  She has refused me again.”

I groaned in spirit.  I knew it must have come to that.  Yet I would ask when and where.

“’Twas on our last day’s riding,” he went on; “after we had had your note saying you would undertake a mission for Colonel Davie.”

I took two steps and groped for the horse’s bridle rein.

“Did she tell you why she must refuse you?”

He helped me find the rein for my hand and the stirrup for my foot.

“There was no ‘why’ but the one—­she does not love me.”

“But I say she does, Dick; and I, too, know whereof I speak.”

He flung me into the saddle as a strong man might toss a boy, and I understood how that saying of mine had gone into his blood.

“Then there must be some barrier that I know not of,” he said.  Whereupon he put hand to head as one who tries to remember.  “Stay; did you not say there was a barrier, Jack?—­when we were wrestling with death in the Indian fires?  Or did I dream it?”

“You did not dream it.  But you were telling me what she said.”

“Oh, yes; ’twas little enough.  She cut me off at the first word as if my speaking were a mortal sin.  And when I would have tried again, she gave me a look to make me wince and broke out crying as if her heart would burst.”

I steadied myself as I could by the saddle horn and waited till he was up and we were moving on.  Then I would say:  “Truly, there is a barrier, Richard; if I promise you that I am going to Charlotte to remove it once for all, will you trust me and go about your affair with General Gates?”

“Trust you, Jack?  Who am I that I should do aught else?  When I am cool and sane, I’m none so cursed selfish; I could even give her over to you with a free hand, could I but hear her say she loves you as I would have her love me.  But when I am mad....  Ah, God only knows the black blood there is in the heart at such times.”

We rode on together in silence after that, and were come to the bank of the river before we spoke again.  But here Dick went back to my warning, saying, whilst we let the horses drink:  “’Tis patrolled on the other bank, you say?”

“It was when I passed it a few days agone.”

“Then I will turn back and cross at Beattie’s.  ’Twill make you a risk you need not take—­to have me with you.”

But I thought now that the upper ford might be guarded as well; and if there must be a cutting of a road through the enemy’s outpost line for Dick, two could do it better than one.  So I said: 

“No; we are here now, and if need be I can lend you the weight of a second blade to see you safe through.”

“And you with your head humming like a basket of bees, as I make no doubt it will?”

I laughed.  “I should be but a sorry soldier and a sorrier friend if I should let a love-tap with the flat of a blade make me fail you at the pinch.”