“Save a thing you would value lightly enough without her love.  Let us have done with this bickering; find the colonel and ask his leave to go with me, if you like.  Then you may do the love-making whilst I do the spying.”

“No,” said he; “not while you stand it upon such a leg as that.”

I reached across and gripped his hand and wrung it.  “Shall we never have the better of these senseless vaporings?” I cried. “’Tis as you say; I can neither live sane nor die mad without another sight of her, Dick, and that is the plain truth.  And yet, mark me, this next seeing of her will surely set a thing in train that will make her yours and not mine.  Get your leave and come with me on your own terms.  Mayhap she will show you how little she cares for me, and how much she cares for you.”

So this is how it came about that we two, garbed as decent planters and mounted upon the sleekest cobs the regiment afforded, took the road for Winnsborough together on a certain summer-fine morning in January in the year of battles, seventeen hundred and eighty-one.

XLV

IN WHICH WE FIND WHAT WE NEVER SOUGHT

’Tis fifty miles as a bird would fly it from the grazing uplands of the Broad known as the Cowpens to the lower plantation region lying between that stream and the farther Catawba or Wateree; and Richard Jennifer and I ambled the distance leisurely, as befitted our mission and disguise, cutting the journey evenly in half for the first night’s lodging, which we had at the house of one Philbrick—­as hot a Tory as we pretended to be.

From our host of the night we learned that within two days the British outposts on the Wateree and the Broad had been advanced; and there were rumors in the air that Lord Cornwallis, who was hourly expecting General Leslie with two thousand of Sir Henry Clinton’s men from New York, would presently move on to the long-deferred conquest of North Carolina.

“Has Cornwallis lost his wits?” Dick would say, when we were a-jog on the southward road again. “’Tis a braver lordling than I gave him credit for being—­if he will put his head in a trap that will close behind him and cut him off from his line and base.”

I laughed.  “You may wager Jennifer House against an acre of the Cowpens that Lord Charles will do no such unsoldierly thing.  If this rumor be true, we have heard only the half of it.”

“And the other half will be?—­”

“That my Lord Cornwallis will do his prettiest to pull the teeth of one or the other of the trap-jaws before he trusts himself within them.”

Jennifer was silent for an ambling minute or two.  Then he said:  “’Twill be our teeth he’ll try to pull, then.  The Broad is nearer than the Pedee; and ours is the weaker of the two jaws.”

“Right you are,” said I.  “And now we know what we have to discover.”

“Anan?” he queried.