As you have guessed, I was Coverdale’s next friend and second in this affair, and but for the upsetting news of the Tryon tyranny in Carolina,—­news which reached me on the very day of the meeting,—­I should there and then have called the slayer to his account.

How my father who, Presbyterian and Ireton though he was, had always been of the king’s side, came to espouse the cause of the “Regulators,” as they called themselves, I know not.  In my youthful memories of him he figures as the feudal lord of his own domain, more absolute than many of the petty kinglings I came afterward to know in the German marches.  But this, too, I remember; that while his rule at Appleby Hundred was stern and despotic enough, he was ever ready to lend a willing ear to any tale of oppression.  And if what men say of the tyrant Tryon’s tax-gatherers and law-court robbers be no more than half truth, there was need for any honest gentleman to oppose them.

What that opposition came to in ’71 is now a tale twice told.  Taken in arms against the governor’s authority, and with an estate well worth receiving, my father had little justice and less mercy accorded him.  With many others he was outlawed; his estates were declared forfeit; and a few days later he, with Benjamin Merrill and four more captivated at the Alamance, was given some farce of a trial and hanged.

When the news of this came to me you may well suppose that I had no heart to continue in the service of the king who could sanction and reward such villainies as these of the butcher William Tryon.  So I threw up my lieutenant’s commission in the Blues, took ship for the Continent, and, after wearing some half-dozen different uniforms in Germany, was lucky enough to come at length to serviceable blows under my old field-marshal on the Turkish frontier.

To you of a younger generation, born in the day of swift mail-coaches and well-kept post-roads, the slowness with which our laggard news traveled in that elder time must needs seem past belief.  It was early in the year ’79 before I began to hear more than vague camp-fire tales of the struggle going on between the colonies and the mother country; and from that to setting foot once more upon the soil of my native Carolina was still another year.

What I found upon landing at New Berne and saw while riding a jog-trot thence to the Catawba was a province rent and torn by partizan warfare.  Though I came not once upon the partizans themselves in all that long faring, there were trampled fields and pillaged houses enough to serve as mile-stones; and in my native Mecklenburg a mine full charged, with slow-match well alight for its firing.

Charleston had fallen, and Colonel Tarleton’s outposts were already widespread on the upper waters of the Broad and the Catawba.  Thus it was that the first sight which greeted my eyes when I rode into Queensborough was the familiar trappings of my old service, and I was made to know that in spite of Mr. Jefferson’s boldly written Declaration of Independence, and that earlier casting of the king’s yoke by the patriotic Mecklenburgers themselves, my boyhood home was for the moment by sword-right a part of his Majesty’s province of North Carolina.