“She is safe enough; safer by far than you are at this minute, my young cock-a-hoop rebel, now that the king—­God save him!—­has his own again.”

I turned quickly on the broad door-stone to look within.  Out of doors the early August dawn was graying mistily overhead, but in the house the sputtering tallow dip still struggled feebly with the gloom.  They stood facing each other, these two, my handsome lad, the pick and choice of a comely race, looking, for all his toils and vigils, fresh and fit; and the old man in his woolen dressing-gown, his wig awry, and his lean face yellow in the candle-light.

“How is that you say, Mr. Stair?” says Dick.  “The king—­but that is only the old Tory cry.  There will never be a king again this side of the water.”

The old man reached out and hooked a lean finger in the lad’s buttonhole.  “Say you so, Richard Jennifer?  Then you will never have heard the glorious news?” This with a leer that might have been of triumph or the mere whetting of gossip eagerness—­I could not tell.

“No,” says Richard, with much indifference.

“Hear it, then.  ’Twas at Camden, four days since.  They came together in the murk of the Wednesday morning, my Lord Cornwallis and that poor fool Gates.  De Kalb is dead; your blethering Irishman, Rutherford, is captured; and your rag-tag rebel army is scattered to the four winds.  And that’s not all.  On the Friday, Colonel Tarleton came up with Sumter at Fishing Creek and caught him napping.  Whereupon, Charlie McDowell and the over-mountain men, seeing all was lost, broke their camp on the Broad and took to their heels, every man jack of them for himself.  So ye see, Dickie Jennifer, there’s never a cursed corporal’s guard left in either Carolina to stand in the king’s way.”

He rattled all this off glibly, like a child repeating some lesson got by heart; but when I would have found a grain of comfort in the hope that it was a farrago of Falconnet’s lies, Jennifer made the truth appear in answer to a curt question.

“’Tis beyond doubt?—­all this, Mr. Stair?”

The old loyalist—­loyalist now, if never certainly before—­sat down on the settle and laughed; a dry wizened cackle of a laugh that sounded like the crumpling of new parchment.

“You’d best be off, light foot and tight foot, Master Richard, lest you learn shrewdly for yourself.  ’Tis in everybody’s mouth by this.  There were some five-and-forty of the king’s friends come together here no longer ago than yestere’en to drink his Majesty’s health, and eh, man! but it will cost me a pretty penny!  Will that satisfy ye?”

“Yes,” said Jennifer, thinking, mayhap, as I did, that nothing short of gospel-true news would have sufficed to unlock this poor old miser’s wine cellar.

“Well, then; you’d best be off while you may; d’ye hear?  I bear ye no ill-will, Richard Jennifer; and if Mr. Tarleton lays hold of you, you’ll hang higher than Haman for evading your parole, I promise you.  We’ll say naught about this rape of the door-lock, though ’tis actionable, sir, and I’ll warn you the law would make you smart finely for it.  But we’ll enter a nolle prosequi on that till you’re amnestied and back, then you can pay me the damage of the broken lock and we’ll cry quits.”