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Wickersham had been thinking hard during Plume's statement of the case, and what with his argument and an occasional application to the decanter of whiskey, he was beginning to yield. Just then a sealed note was handed him by a waiter. He tore it open and read: "I am going home; my heart is broken. Good-by."
Plume's statement was that he had been off on private business and had met with an accident. The nature of this "accident" was evident in his appearance. Keith was hardly surprised when, a day or two after the rumor of the girl's disappearance reached him, a heavy step thumping outside his office door announced the arrival of Squire Rawson.
Plume's guidance, he sought the entertainment of Terpsichore's Hall. He had been greatly struck by Terpy that night on the road, when she had faced down the men and had afterwards bound up Keith's arm. He had heard from Plume rumors of her frequent trips over the road and jests of her fancy for Keith. He would test it.
Before eleven, however, this new martial domestic had gone upstairs to bed and Blakely was all alone, which was as he wished it, for he had things to plan and other things to think of that lifted him above the possibility of loneliness. Down the line of officers' quarters only in two or three houses could lights be seen. Darkness reigned at Plume's, where Byrne was still rooming.
Plume's, and so to Captain Cocke's, and there dined with him, and Colonell Wyndham, a worthy gentleman, whose wife was nurse to the present King, and one that while she lived governed him and every thing else, as Cocke says, as a minister of state; the old King putting mighty weight and trust upon her.
Now Plume's standing orders were that no liquor should be sold to Downs at the store and none to other soldiers except in "pony" glasses and for use on the spot. None could be carried away unconsumed.
Thirty sturdy soldiers of the infantry under a veteran captain marched as escort, with Plume's orders to push through to the relief of Sergeant Brewster's command, and to send back Indian runners with full account of the situation.
"She stabbed a soldier who meant her no harm," was Plume's sullen and stubborn answer to all appeals, for good and gentle women went to him, begging permission to go to her. It angered him presently to the extent of repeating his words with needless emphasis and additions when Mother Shaughnessy came to make her special appeal.
Plume's turn now to have to play nurse and comforter, and to strive to soothe, even to the extent of promising that Elise should be permitted to start by the very next stage to the distant sea, but when it came to securing passage, and in feverish, nervous haste the Frenchwoman had packed her chosen belongings into the one little trunk the stage people would consent to carry, lo! there came to her a messenger from headquarters where Colonel Byrne, grim, silent, saturnine, was again in charge.
Plume's assurance that the bride was a great heiress in the South, and knowing that Ferdy Wickersham was a man who rarely lost his head, a circumstance which the latter testified by handing him a roll of greenbacks amounting to exactly one hundred dollars, and the bride being very pretty and shy, and manifestly most eager to be married, he gave his word to keep the matter a secret until they should authorize him to divulge it.
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