I laughed.  “I’ve read about those noble ones,” I said. “’Twas in a book called ‘Hakluyt’s Voyages.’  Truly, I know them not as you do, for in my youth I knew them most in war.  We called them brave but cruel then; and when I was a boy I could have shown you where, within a mile of this, they burned poor Davie Davidson at the stake.”

“Ah, yes; there has been much of that,” he sighed.  “But you must confess, Captain Ireton, that you English carry fire and sword among them, too.”

From that he would have told me more about the savages, but I was interested nearer home.  As I have said, I was like any prisoner in a dungeon for lack of news, and so by degrees I fetched him round to telling me of what was going on beyond my window-sight of lawn and forest.

Brave deeds were to the fore, it seemed.  At Ramsour’s Mill, a few miles north and west, some little handful of determined patriots had bested thrice their number of the king’s partizans, and that without a leader bigger than a county colonel.  Lord Rawdon, in command of Lord Cornwallis’s van, had come as far as Waxhaw Creek, but, being unsupported, had withdrawn to Hanging Rock.  Our Mr. Rutherford was on his way to the Forks of Yadkin to engage the Tories gathering under Colonel Bryan.  As yet, it seemed, we had no force of any consequence to take the field against Cornwallis, though there were flying rumors of an army marching from Virginia, with a new-appointed general at its head.

On the whole it was the king’s cause that prospered, and the rising wave of invasion bade fair to inundate the land.  So thought my kindly gossip; and, having naught to gain or lose in the great war, or rather having naught to lose and everything to gain, whichever way these worldly cards might run, he was a fair, impartial witness.

As you may well suppose, this news awoke in me the lust of battle, and I must chafe the more for having it.  And while my visitor talked on, and I was listening with the outward ear, my brain was busy putting two and two together.  How came it that the British outpost still remained at Queensborough, with my Lord Rawdon withdrawn and the patriot home guard well down upon its rear?  Some urgent reason for the stay there must be; and at that I remembered what Darius had told me of its captain’s waiting for some messenger from the south.

I scored this matter with a question mark, putting it aside to think on more when I should be alone.  And when the priest had told me all the news at large, we came again to speak of Margery.

“I go and come through all this borderland,” he said, when I had asked him how and why he came to Appleby Hundred, “but it was mam’selle’s message brought me here.  She is my one ewe lamb in all this region, and I would journey far to see her.”

I wondered pointedly at this, for in that day the West was fiercely Protestant and the Mother Church had scanty footing in the borderland.