So he and his factor fell to ciphering on a bit of paper, reckoning ways and means, as I took it, while Falconnet was asking for more particular orders.

“You’ll have them from headquarters direct,” said Stuart.  “Oconostota will furnish carriers, a Cherokee escort, and guides.  The rendezvous will be hereabouts, and your route will be the Great Trace.”

“Then we are to hold on all and wait still longer?”

“That’s the word:  wait for the Indians and your cargo.”

Falconnet’s oath was of impatience.

“We’ve waited now a month and more like men with halters round their necks.  The country is alive with rebels.”

Whereupon Captain Stuart began to explain at large how the northern route had been chosen for its very hazards, the better to throw the partizans off the scent.  I listened, eager for every word, but when the horses stirred behind me I was set back upon the oft-recurrent under-thought of how the gloom did also hide a silent figure lying prone, with the three bridle reins knotted round its wrist.

But though the unnerving under-thought would not begone, the scene within the great room held me fast by eye and ear.  The master and his factor sat apart, their heads together over the knotty problem of subsistence for the convoy troop.  At the table-end, with the bottle gurgling now at one right hand and now at another, the three king’s men drank confusion to the rebels, and in the intervals discussed the powder-convoy’s route across the mountains.  The senior plotter had some map or chart of his own making, and he was pricking out on it for Falconnet the route agreed upon in council with the Cherokees.

At this cool outlaying of the working plan, some proper sense of what this plot of savage-arming meant to every undefended cabin on the frontier seized and thrilled me.  I knew, as every border-born among us knew, the dismal horrors of an Indian massacre; and this these men were planning was treacherous murder on an unwarned people.  All was to be done in midnight secrecy.  Supplied with ammunition, the Cherokees, led by this Captain Stuart or some other, were first to fall upon the over-mountain settlements.  These laid waste, the Indians were to form a junction with the army of invasion, and so to add the torch and tomahawk and scalping knife to British swords and muskets.

It was a plot to make the blood run cold in my veins, or in the veins of any man who knew the cruel temper of these savages; and when I thought upon the fate of my poor countrymen beyond the mountains, I saw what lay before me.

The settlers must be warned in time to fight or fly.

But while I listened, with every faculty alert to reckon with the task of rescue, I take no shame in saying that the problem balked me.  Lacking the strength to mount and ride in my own proper person, there was nothing for it but to find a messenger; and who would he be in a region at the moment distraught with war’s alarums, and needing every man for self-defense?