“Oh, Lord!” groaned Falconnet.  “I say, Captain, drown the names in the wine and we’ll drink them so.  ’Tis by far the easiest way to swallow them.”

By this, the grizzled captain’s mention of the old Fort Loudon massacre, I knew him for that same John Stuart of the Highlanders who, with Captain Damare, had so stoutly defended the frontier fort against the savages twenty years before; knew him and wondered I had not sooner placed him.  When I was but a boy, as I could well remember, he had been king’s man to the Cherokees; a sort of go-between in times of peace, and in the border wars a man the Indians feared.  But now, as I was soon to learn, he was a man for us to fear.

“’Tis carried through at last,” he went on, when the toast was drunk.  And then he stopped and held up a warning finger.  “This business will not brook unfriendly ears.  Are we safe to talk it here, Mr. Stair?”

It was Falconnet who answered.

“Safe as the clock.  You passed my sentry in the road?”

“Yes.”

“He is the padlock of a chain that reaches round the house.  Let’s have your news, Captain.”

“As I was saying, the Indians are at one with us.  ’Twas all fair sailing in the council at Echota; the Chelakees being to a man fierce enough to dig the hatchet up.  But I did have the devil’s own teapot tempest with my Lord Charles.  He says we have more friends than enemies in the border settlements, and these our redskins will tomahawk them all alike.”

I made a mental note of this and wondered if my Lord Cornwallis had met with some new change of heart.  He was not over-squeamish as I had known him.  Then I heard the baronet say: 

“But yet the thing is done?”

“As good as done.  The Indians are to have powder and lead of us, after which they make a sudden onfall on the over-mountain settlements.  And that fetches us to your part in it, Sir Frank; and to yours, Mr. Stair.  Your troop, Captain, will be the convoy for this powder; and you, Mr. Stair, are requisitioned to provide the commissary.”

There was silence while a cat might wink, and then Gilbert Stair broke in upon it shrilly.

“I can not, Captain Stuart; that I can not!” he protested, starting from his chair. “’Twill ruin me outright!  The place is stripped,—­you know it well, Sir Francis,—­stripped bare and clean by these thieving rebel militia-men; bare as the back of your hand, I tell you!  I—­”

But the captain put him down in brief.

“Enough, Mr. Stair; we’ll not constrain you against your will.  But ’tis hinted at headquarters that you are but a fair-weather royalist at best—­nay, that for some years back you have been as rebel as the rest in this nesting-place of traitors.  As a friend—­mind you, as a friend—­I would advise you to find the wherewithal to carry out my Lord’s commands.  Do you take me, Mr. Stair?”

The trembling old man fell back in his chair, nodding his “yes” dumbly like a marionette when the string has been jerked a thought too violently, and his weasel face was moist and clammy.  I know not what double-dealing he would have been at before this, but it was surely something with the promise of a rope at the publishing of it.