A litter they fashioned from a lid of a chest while the search was going on, and I was lifted upon it with due regard to my wounds, which I thought a generous thing of Captain Waller, inasmuch as his own face was frowning with the pain of the wound which I had given him, but he was a brave man, and a brave man is ever a generous foe.

But when I was on the litter, breathing hard, yet with some consciousness, he bent close over me, and whispered “Sir, your wounds are bound up with strips torn from a woman’s linen.  I have a wife, and I know.  Who was in hiding here, sir?”

My eyes flew wide open at that.

“No one,” I gasped out.  “No one as I live.”

But he laughed, and bending still lower, whispered, “Have no fear as to that, Master Wingfield.  Convict or not, you are a brave man, and that which you perchance gave your life to hide, shall be hidden for all Robert Waller.”

So saying he gave the order to carry me forth with as little jolting as might be, and stationed himself at my side lest I come to harm from some over-zealous soldier.  But in truth the militia and the officers in those days were apparently of somewhat uncertain quantity as regarded their allegiance to the King or the Colony.

The sympathy of many of them was with the colonists who made a stand against tyranny, and they were half-hearted, if whole-handed, for the King.

Just before they bore me across the threshold of Laurel Creek, those troopers who had been sent to search the house, clattered down the stair and swore that not so much as a mouse was in hiding there, then we all went forth.

Captain Waller, though walking somewhat weakly himself, kept close to my side.  And he did not mount horse until we were out in the highway.

The grounds of Laurel Creek and the tobacco fields were a most lamentable sight, though I seemed to see everything as through a mist.  Here and there one lay sprawled with limbs curled like a dead spider, or else flung out at a stiff length of agony.  And Capt.  Noel Jaynes lay dead with a better look on his gaunt old face in death than in life.  In truth Capt.  Noel Jaynes might almost have been taken for a good man as he lay there dead.  And the outlaw who lived next door to Margery Key was doubled up where he fell in a sulky heap of death, and by his side wept his shrewish wife, shrilly lamenting as if she were scolding rather than grieving, and I trow in the midst of it all, the thought passed through my mind that it was well for that man that he was past hearing, for it seemed as if she took him to task for having died.

Of Dick Barry was no sign to be seen, but Nick lay not dead, but dead drunk, and over him was crouched one of those black women with a knife in her hand, and no one molested her, thinking him dead, but dead he was not, only drunk, and she was wounded herself, with the blood trickling from her head, unable to carry him from the field as she had brought him.