CHAPTER XI

DEVIL AND DEEP SEA

The campaigner instinct told Dad what raised so odd a cloud on the dry dust of the road. From its position and formation, he knew it hung above a cavalry column of considerable size.

A glance at the road at his feet showed him that no such large body of horsemen had passed during the past two hours. The column, then, was coming toward him.

And between him and it lay no crossroad.

There was but one possible move for him; for already the hoof-beats of the four guerrillas’ horses were growing louder.

Dad wheeled his horse and rode back at a dead gallop along the main road he had just entered.

Past the byway’s mouth he sped and straight on. The guerrillas, still on the byway, noted the maneuver and, with a quadruple yell, struck out across the intervening field to cut him off.

And for a brief space their action favored the refugee.

For the field they entered was newly and deeply plowed. Moreover, through its center, in a depression, was a bit of boggy ground almost worthy the name of quagmire.

The horses lumbered heavily over the plowed ground and sank almost to their knees when they came to the strip of mire. The roan, meantime, tore along the hard, yellow highway with undiminished speed.

One of the guerrillas whipped out a pistol and fired thrice in quick succession.

A bullet whined querulously past Dad’s head. A second caught him fairly in the bridle arm.

The shot was fired at longest pistol-range, and its force was almost spent before it reached its mark. Yet it bit its way through the uniform coat and the shirt-sleeve, and inflicted a light flesh-wound in the forearm.

The shock of the blow knocked the rein from Dad’s left hand and numbed his left arm to the shoulder. At the jerk on the bit the great roan swerved sharply in surprise.

Dad caught the loose-flung rein in his right hand and guided the terrified horse back into the road’s center.

As he did so a chinkapin and live-oak forest shut him off from the view of the floundering guerrillas.

“They never knew I was hit,” he growled. “That’s one comfort.”

He glanced down at his left arm. Already an inordinately large patch of blood was discoloring the blue uniform on either side of the bullet hole.

“Must have tapped a big vein or maybe an artery,” he conjectured, as he saw the blood trickle fast from the edge of his cuff. “At this rate, I’ll be too weak in a few minutes to sit in the saddle. I’ll have to stop somewhere to stanch it.”

He looked back. No sign yet of the guerrillas. He had been too far away from the larger cavalry column, he knew, for any of its riders to distinguish himself or his uniform. The thick woods still closed in the road on either side.

Dad looked for a likely spot to penetrate the forest.

But on both sides of the road a high snake-fence arose, a fence too high for any horse to jump.

There would be no time to dismount, tear down a panel of the fence, lead his horse through, and repair the gap so that the guerrillas’ sharp eyes would not detect the recent break.

So on he galloped, hoping for a gate or a lane farther ahead.

With a deal of wriggling Dad got his right arm out of his jacket and managed to wind the jacket itself roughly around his left arm, that a trail of bloodspots on the road’s dust might not mark his path to his pursuers.

Around another bend swept the galloping roan. And now both forest and snake-fence stopped abruptly, to continue a furlong farther on. The intervening space was filled by a soft, green lawn dotted with trees, and cut off from the road by a four-foot stone wall.

Far back on the lawn and bowered by oaks stood a rambling house of colonial style.

On its pillared front porch sat the littlest and daintiest woman imaginable. She was in black and wore a little, frilled, white apron. Her grayish hair formed a mass of soft curls around her forehead. On her lap was a basket of knitting.

All these details Dad’s eyes saw without fairly grasping them as he galloped into view. And his heart sank.

He had heard of Southern women’s splendid loyalty to “the cause.” This woman would assuredly tell his pursuers that she had seen a man in Yankee uniform ride past. She would add that he was very palpably wounded.

Thus would die his last hope that they might give extra time by pausing to beat up the woods for him.

Dad was turning away from his fleeting glance to scan the road ahead for a lane or other opening, when suddenly he shifted his gaze in astonishment back toward the white-columned portico.

The little woman had sprung to her feet with the agility of a child and was waving her knitting to him in frantic summons.

He had traversed fully half the length of the cleared lawn’s space as he saw the signal. Acting on lightning instinct, he reined in his mount, wheeled him to one side, and put him at the wall.

The roan, with a mighty effort, cleared the obstacle, came down heavily on all fours on the springy turf of the lawn, and bounded toward the house.

The little lady had run down the steps and was jumping up and down in wild excitement in the driveway.

“Tumble off, quick!” she ordered. “Get into the hall there and shut the door behind you. I’ll tie your horse in that magnolia copse over yonder. It’s so thick-grown I guess they’d hunt a week before suspicioning a critter was hid there.”

Dad rolled out of the saddle in dazed obedience, staggered weakly up the steps and into a broad hall that bisected the house from front to rear. The dim coolness struck him like a blow. He groped for a horsehair sofa that he could just distinguish in the half-light, sank down on it, and slid helplessly from its slippery seat to the polished floor--in a dead faint.

Within a minute he opened his eyes and broke into a fit of strangled coughing. A most horrible odor had gripped his sense of smell.

Above him knelt the little woman. In one hand she held a bunch of feathers tom from a duster; in the other a still lighted match. A fume of smoke from the feathers spoke eloquently of the odor’s origin.

“Nothing like burning a bunch of feathers under a body’s nose to bring them out of a fainting fit,” she was saying cheerily. “Don’t look so wild, man. You’re safe enough. Or you will be presently. Can you stand up? Try.”

Dad called on all his failing strength and, helped by the little lady and a hand on the sofa-arm, reeled to his feet.

“So!” she approved. “Now, you just lean on me and on the banisters. We’ve got some climbing to do. Your horse is safe hid. And the men that were chasing you have ridden past. But they’ll be back.”