’Twas not until we had safely run the gantlet of the vedette lines by a by-path known to the old hunter, and had shaken off the troopers that were following, that I found time to ask what had become of the men who had formed the ambush in the shrubbery.

The old man gave me his dry chuckle of a laugh.

“’Twas the same old roose de geer, as the down-country Frenchers ’u’d say.  I stole the drunken sergeant’s gun and two others, and let ’em off one to a time.  As for the screechin’, one bazoo’s as good as a dozen, if so be ye blow it fierce enough.”

“’Twas cut and dried beforehand,” Dick explained.  “I had an inkling of what was afoot from Ephraim, here, whom I stumbled on when I dropped from the stair window that Madge opened for me.  He went to set his one-man ambush whilst I was trying to warn you.”

“So,” said I.  “Our skins are whole, but after all we have come off with never a word to take back to Dan Morgan—­unless you have the word.”

“Not I,” Dick said, ruefully.

The old man chuckled again.

“Ye ain’t old enough, neither one o’ ye, ez I allow.  It takes a right old person to fish out the innards of an inimy’s secrets.  Colonel Tarleton, hoss, foot and dragoons, with the seventh rigiment and a part o’ the seventy-first, will take the big road for Dan Morgan’s camp to-morrow at sun-up.  And right soon atterwards, Gin’ral Cornwallis’ll foller on.  Is that what you youngsters was trying to find out?”

XLVII

ARMS AND THE MAN

In that book he wrote—­the book in which he never so much as names the name of Ireton—­my Lord Cornwallis’s commissary-general, Charles Stedman, damns Colonel Tarleton in a most gentlemanly manner for his ill-success at the Cowpens, and would charge to his account personal the failure of Cornwallis’s plan to crush in detail the patriot Army of the South.

Now little as I love, or have cause to love, Sir Banastre Tarleton,—­they tell me he has been knighted and now wears a major-general’s sword-knot,—­’tis but the part of outspoken honest enmity to say that we owed the victory at the Cowpens to no remissness on the part of the young legion commander who, if he were indeed the most brutal, was also the most active and enterprising of Lord Cornwallis’s field officers.

No, it was no remissness nor lack of bravery on the part of the enemy.  ’Twas only that the tide had turned.  King’s Mountain had been fought and won, and there were to be no more Camdens for us.

In the affair at the cow pastures, which followed hard upon Richard’s and my return from our flying visit to Winnsborough, the very elements fought for us and against the British.  As for instance:  Tarleton, with his famous legion of horse, and infantry enough to make his numbers exceed ours, began his march on the eleventh and was rained on and mired for four long days before he had crossed the Broad and had come within scouting distance of us.