At this my straightforward Richard snorted in wrathful derision.  However much he loved the daughter, ’twas clear he had small regard for the father.

“Seeing we came to do you a service, Mr. Stair, I think we may set the blunderbuss and the handful of slugs over against the smashed door.  And that fetches me back to our errand here.  You say Madge is safe.  Does that mean that you have spirited her away since last night?”

“Dinna fash yoursel’ about Madge, Richard Jennifer.  She’s meat for your betters, sir!” rasped the old man, lapsing into the mother tongue, as he did now and then in fear or anger.

“Still I would know what you mean when you say she is safe,” says Richard, whose determination to crack a nut was always proportioned to the hardness of the shell.

Gilbert Stair cursed him roundly for an impertinent jackanapes, and then gave him his answer.

“’Tis none of your business, Dickie Jennifer, but you may know and be hanged to you!  She rode home with the Witherbys last night after the rout, and will be by this safe away in t’other Carolina where your cursed Whiggeries darena lift head or hand.”

“Of her own free will?” Dick persisted.

“Damme! yes; bag, baggage, serving wench and all.  Now will you be off about your business before some spying rascal lays an information against me for harboring you?”

Richard joined me on the door-stone.  The dawn was in its twilight now, and the great trees on the lawn were taking gray and ghostly shapes in the dim perspective.

“You heard what he had to say?” said he.

I nodded.

“It seems we have missed our cue on all sides,” he went on, not without bitterness.  “I would we might have had a chance to fire a shot or two before the ship went down.”

“At Camden, you mean?  That’s but the beginning; the real battles are all to be fought yet, I should say.”

He shook his head despondently.  “You are a newcomer, Jack, and you know not how near outworn the country is.  Gilbert Stair has the right of it when he says there will be nothing to stop the redcoats now.”

I called to mind the resolute little handful under Captain Abram Forney, one of many such, he had told me, and would not yield the point.

“There will be plenty of fighting yet, and we must go to bear a hand where it is needed most,” said I.  “Where will that be, think you?  At Charlotte?”

He looked at me reproachfully.

“This time ’tis you who are the laggard in love, John Ireton.  Will you go and leave Mistress Margery wanting an answer to her poor little cry for help?”

I shrugged.  “What would you?  Has she not taken her affair into her own hands?”