I should have told him then all there was to tell.  He had been thrice my savior, and his heart was soft and malleable on the side of friendship.  I knew it—­knew that the pregnant moment for full confession had arrived; and yet I could not force my tongue to shape the words.  Indeed, I saw more clearly than before that never any word of mine could make him understand that I was not a faithless traitor in intention.  So I paltered with the truth, like any wretched coward of them all.

“You forget that I have come to know her well,” I said.  “I was a month or more under the same roof with her, and in that time she told me many things.”

Now, this witless speech was no better than a whip to flog him on.

“What things?” he questioned, promptly.

“Oh, many things.  She spoke often of you.”

“What did she say of me, Jack?  Tell me what she said,” he begged.  “It can make no difference now; she is less than nothing to me—­nay,’tis even worse than that, since she would play Delilah if she could.  But oh, Jack, I love her!—­I should love her if I stood on the gallows and she stood by to spring the drop and turn me off!”

Truly, if the lash of remorse had lacked its keenest thong, this passionate outburst of his would have added it.  None the less, I must needs be weaker than water and fall back another step and put him off.

“Another time, Richard.  I am strangely unnerved and dizzy-headed now.  By and by, when I am stronger, I will tell you all.”

Taking a reproach where none was meant, he sprang up with a self-aimed malison upon his lack of care for me, stirred the fire alive and brewed me a most delicious-smelling cup of broth.  And afterward, when I had drunk the broth with some small beckonings of returning appetite, he spread his coat to screen me from the fire light and would have driven me to sleep again.

“At any rate, you shall not talk,” he promised.  “If you are wakeful I will talk to you and tell you what little I have gleaned about the fighting.”

His news was chiefly a later repetition of Father Matthieu’s and Captain Abram Forney’s, but there was this to add:  the Congress had appointed the Englishman, Horatio Gates, chief of the army in the South, and this new leader was on his way to take command.

De Kalb, with the Maryland and Delaware lines and Colonel Armand’s legion, was encamped on Deep River, waiting for the newly-appointed general; and Caswell and Griffith Rutherford, with the militia, were already pressing forward to some handgrips with my Lord Cornwallis in the South.

Nearer at hand, the partizan war-fire flamed afresh wherever a Tory company met a patriot, and there were wicked doings, more like savage massacres than fair-fought battles of the soldier sort.

When he had made an end of his small war budget, I set him on to tell me how he came to be at hand to help me so in the nick of time on the night of the cabin sack.