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Updated: May 2, 2025
"How can I sleep, with this sense of responsibility?" Demeré returned, reproachfully.
Stuart could but laugh a little, remembering that Demeré had thought the plan impracticable, and, although there was no other opportunity possible, had protested against it on the point of danger involved to Mrs. MacLeod. Stuart, himself, had quaked on this score, and had seized on this ingenious device only as a last resort. "Mrs. MacLeod is fine timber for a forlorn hope," he said reflectively.
Halsing added, turning an unflinching front toward Mrs. Beedie. Then resuming her dissertation to Odalie: "But there's one thing that rests on my mind. I can't decide which one it belongs to, Captain Stuart or Captain Demeré. Did ye see I know ye did a lady's little riding-mask on the shelf of the great hall. Ye must have seen it," lowering her voice, "a love token?"
Demeré looked up with a changed face from the dispatches just received the first express that had come across the mountains for a month, having dodged and eluded bands of wandering Indian marauders all the way. "Governor Lyttleton has taken the field," he said. "At last!" cried Stuart, as in the extremity of impatience.
Finally Demeré rose, and with a curt phrase of formal farewell, to which neither of the chiefs responded, bowed angrily, and walked out, pausing near the entrance to wait for Stuart, who with blandest ceremony was taking his leave, saying how much he hoped there would be no interruption to the kind friendship with which the great men had personally favored them, and which they so highly valued; and how earnestly he desired to express their thanks for the interview, although it grieved him to perceive that the chiefs felt they could say so little on the subject that had brought him hither.
His intention was evident. "My young friend," said Stuart, carelessly eyeing him, "you are a fine figure of a settler, but that loop-hole is ours!" "Let him have it," said Demeré. "We shall never need it." The door opened suddenly, and the orderly, saluting, announced the express from over the mountains.
He had realized his friend was dead, and he felt that this might fairly be considered the better fate. But somehow the trivial personal belongings so bespoke the vanished presence that he yearned for Demeré in his happy release; the shaken nerves could respond to the echo of a voice forever silenced; he could look into vacancy upon a face he was destined to see never again.
"And besides," added Captain Demeré, whose extreme sensitiveness enabled him better to appreciate her sentiment than the others, despite his rebuke, "you need not have him in the same house with you; you can have two cabins within the stockade and connected by the palisades from one house to the other.
"I never, dear Captain Demeré, think of them, in a garrison of two hundred men in a little mud fort on the frontier, with the Cherokees three thousand strong just outside, toward whom I have been admonished to mind my pretty manners.
Then to Demeré, who had his hand on his pistol, and was casting a keen glance along the shore preparatory to taking aim, "Why do you return the fire, Paul? To make our fate certain? We should be riddled in a moment. I have counted nearly fifty red rascals in those laurel bushes."
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