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"So you have said before. But let that pass, we must bide by our promise to Yeates, which was not to interfere unless Margery stood in present peril. Moreover, we should learn the lay of the land better while we have the firelight to help. When the time for action comes we must be able to make the play with our eyes shut, if need be. Come."
For all the good it did I might have spared my pains and saved my breath. Jennifer broke me in the midst, crying out that I was even now killing the precious minutes; and so our ill-starred venture had its launching in the frenzied haste that seldom makes for speed. One small concession I wrung out of his impatience this with the help of Yeates and the Catawba.
The sun was yet below the eastern horizon when we came to the fording of a larger stream than any we had crossed in the night. Its course was toward the sunrise, hence I took it for some tributary of the Catawba or the Broad. "'Tis the Broad itself," said Ephraim Yeates, in answer to my asking; "and yit it ain't; leastwise, it ain't the one you know.
From what could be seen 'twas clear that the camp was no mere bivouac for the day; indeed, the Englishmen were still working upon their pine-bough shelters, building themselves in as if for a stay indefinite. "'Tis a rest camp," quoth Dick; "though why they should break the march here is more than I can guess." "No," said Ephraim Yeates. "'Tain't jest rightly a rest camp, ez I take it.
Whereupon he flung himself face down in the grass and would not speak again until the waiting time was fully over and Yeates gave the word to fall in line for the advance.
In the steepest part of the ascent where the wood, scanted of rooting ground by the thickly sown strewing of boulders, was open and free of undergrowth, Ephraim Yeates halted suddenly, signed to us with upflung hand, and dropped behind a tree as one shot; and in the same breath the Catawba, running at Yeates's heels, lurched aside and vanished as if the earth had gaped and swallowed him.
To these askings Yeates made answer that Falconnet and his troop, with the Cherokee contingent, had taken the road at midnight, or thereabouts; and that the Witherbys, with Mistress Margery riding her own black mare, and her maid on a pillion behind a negro groom, had passed some two hours later.
The old man leaned his rifle against a tree, spat on his hands, cut a clumsy caper in air, and gave tongue in a yell that should have been heard by Tarleton's men at Appleby. "By the eternal 'coonskins! I can gouge the eye out of ary man that says Eph Yeates carn't stand up fair and square and whop his weight in wildcats; and I can do it now, if not sooner!" he shrilled.
Nevertheless, by the sun's height it was well on in the forenoon before we came out, perspiring, like sappers in a steam bath, upon the mountain top. As Yeates had guessed, this northern mountain proved to be a lofty table-land.
By this the shower cloud had passed and the stars were coming out, but it was still pitch black under the pines; so dark that I started like a nervous woman and went near to panic when a horse snorted at my very ear, and a voice, bodiless, as it seemed, said; "Well, now; the Lord be praised! if here ain't the whole enduring " What Ephraim Yeates would have said, or did say, was lost upon me.
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