CHAPTER XIV

DAD THE PALADIN

The ground-shell of the driveway below resounded thickly to the thudding of hard-ridden horses. Then, with a multifold shuffle, the hoofs came to a standstill.

There were heavy steps on the porch. A hammering broke out, as of gunbutt or sword hilt against the front door panels. And a voice shouted “Let us in!”

“Sakes!” whispered Mrs. Sessions. “I’d clean forgot! There must be a hundred of ’em from the sound.”

“No,” corrected Dad, his practiced ear having enumerated the hoof-beats. “Not more than four or five, I should say. Probably the men who chased me this morning. They’ve come back, as you said, and--”

She was gone, slipping down the stairs in swift noiselessness, closing the attic stairway door behind her.

Pausing only long enough to light a sconce of candles on the table in the wide hallway, Mrs. Sessions sped to the front door, whence the clamor had risen to a deafening pitch.

Unbarring the door, she flung it open, and stood on the threshold, a tiny spirit of wrath.

“What do you folks mean?” she demanded hotly. “What do you folks mean by banging all the varnish off my door panels like that? Couldn’t you use the brass knocker? What do you want, anyway; disturbing an old woman, like this?”

Four guerrillas gave back for an instant--if only for a bare instant--before her indignant outburst. Then one of them laughed.

The spell was broken. Pushing past her, the quartet trooped into the hallway.

At a glance, Mrs. Sessions could see they were tired, cross, and--apparently--more or less drunk. They had evidently moistened more than once the dry tedium of their afternoon’s search.

“You’re old Yankee Sessions’s widder, I reckon,” said one of the four.

“Yes,” she snapped, “I am. But I’ve lived hereabouts for ten years without ever before hearing rude language from any Southern man. No regular Confederate soldier would speak to a woman that way, either, or burst into her house without a ‘by-your-leave.’ It’s you guerrillas that are the pest of both armies. But you aren’t going to be the pest of _my_ house. Out you go, all of you!”

“You spitfire!” hiccoughed the camp-follower. “I wish there was still a ducking-stool for scolds. Keep a civil tongue in your head or we’ll find a way to revive the ducking.”

“What do you want here?”

“We’re looking for a runaway Yank. Seen him go past?”

“Why didn’t you say so first, instead of cluttering up my clean hall with mud and kicking the polish off my door? Yes,” she added with perfect truth, “I saw a Yankee. He was riding lickety-split along the road there.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know. Quite a while back. He seemed to be wounded.”

The four moved excitedly toward the door.

“I said so!” cried one of the men. “Just what I told you. He sneaked into the woods somewhere, and we rode past him. Then he doubled back.”

“Wounded, hey?” said another. “My shots don’t miss. I knew I winged him. If we can get another mile or two of speed out of those nags, we may overhaul him yet.”

Three of the men were at the door. The fourth, following, paused to light a cheroot by one of the candles on the table.

As he was starting on after the others, he came to a sudden stop. His exclamation brought the three bushwhackers back into the hall. The man pointed melodramatically at a little pool of drying blood on the polished hardwood floor in the full glare of the candlelight. Beside the pool lay a Federal infantry cap.

There was no need for words. The story told itself. The four men with one accord turned on Mrs. Sessions.

She had, as though by sheer chance, taken up a position at the stair foot. And there she stood; magnificently futile and as futilely magnificent as a sparrow that bars a prowling tomcat’s way to her nest.

“Well,” she demanded shrilly, “what are you going to do about it?”

“Do?” laughed the drunkest of the four. “Root him out, of course. And you’re li’ble to keep your hair tidier if you’ll take us straight off to where you’ve hid him.”

“I’ve told you twice to get out of here,” she replied, not a faintest trace of fear in her authoritative voice. “And now I tell--”

“Yes,” growled the man, suddenly turning savage at her words, “and your husband, old Yankee Sessions, told me to get out of his house once, a few years back. I was just out of pen, and I was hungry. I stopped here and told his black butler to rustle me some grub and a little spending-money, or I’d cave his woolly head in. That’s the way to speak to niggers. And he--”

“That’s the way nobody but ‘poor white trash’ ever speaks to them, down here,” contradicted Mrs. Sessions. “I remember the time. Ehud was sick abed with quinsy and--”

“And just as I’d got that nigger so scared that he’d do anything I told him,” snarled the bushwhacker, drink and a sour memory combining to enrage him, “down them stairs rushes old Yankee Sessions, half-dressed, and wavin’ a sword in his hand. And he kicked me--yes, kicked _me_--out of his house, the dirty Yank. I reckon here’s where I square accounts with his long-tongued widder.”

He lurched to the stair-foot and caught Mrs. Sessions roughly by the shoulder.

“Show us where you’ve hid the blue-backed cur!” he ordered. “Or we’ll--”

He got no further.

At his brutal touch Mrs. Sessions had involuntarily cried out. A cry of stark indignation, not of terror.

And in the midst of the guerrilla’s surly threat she saw the unshaven mouth grow speechless and slack; the drink-bleared eyes widen in crass horror.

The unwashed paw fell inert from her shoulder. The man reeled back a step as though struck across the face. He was staring stupidly at the stairway. And his fellows had followed the direction of his gaze.

All this in the fraction of a second; even as Mrs. Sessions turned to note the cause of the strange panic.

Out of the darkness of the upper landing had sprung a terrible figure. For an instant, as it gathered itself to bound down the broad and shallow flight of stairs, it was vaguely and weirdly outlined by the uncertain candlelight below.

A man, towering, fierce; coatless and without waist-coat. His face was white and distorted with wrath. His eyes blazed in the half-light like living coals. His gray hair was a-bristle.

Above his head flashed a sword-blade.

“Yankee Sessions!” croaked the drunken guerrilla, in babbling fear. “Yankee Sessions’s ghost! Just as he came at me that day when--”

The man at the stair-head cleared the intervening steps in three bounds. With a berserk yell he was among the guerrillas, his swirling sword giving forth a million sparks of reflection from the candle-glow.

There was a moment of wild turmoil; of clashing, of yells, of madly stamping feet.

Mrs. Sessions, leaning weakly against the newel-post of the banisters, saw an indistinguishable mass of figures, whirling, jostling, screaming; while once and again above the ruck flashed the sword-blade like a tongue of silver flame.

A cleverly aimed sweep of the blade as the knot of men swayed bodily toward the table, and both candle sconces were knocked violently to the floor.

The sudden darkness was too much for the guerrillas’ drink-shaken nerves. Still in strong doubt as to whether the hero who had attacked them were ghost or human, they had made shift momentarily to hold their ground.

But to cope in the dark with a possible wraith--a homicidal wraith at that--was more than they had bargained for.

Panic--mad and unreasoning--possessed them. Behind, an oblong of lesser gloom through the blackness showed the location of the door.

And through the door they surged pell-mell.

Down the steps they rushed and flung themselves upon their waiting horses. Out of the grounds they galloped and down the road.

A hundred yards farther on they drew rein as by common consent. But before they could bring their mounts to a halt the clatter of hoofs behind them sent their scared gaze backward.

By the pale starlight they could just distinguish their half-clad foe--enormous and ghostly in the dim light--astride a monster horse, bearing down on them at the speed of an express-train. The sword still gleamed above his head.

There was no pause; there was no consultation; there was no impulse to investigate.

Swayed by a single purpose, the four guerrillas urged their tired horses to a run. Down the road they streamed, their ghostly foe in close pursuit.

Presently--or, as it seemed to them, after a thousand years of terror-flight--the foremost of them reached the by-road. And, with the instinct of a burrow-seeking rabbit, he wheeled his horse into it. His three comrades followed his example.

They had ridden for perhaps a mile when the rear-most of them paused to make certain of what he had begun to hope, that their terrible ghost-foe had ceased his pursuit.

One by one the guerrillas drew in their exhausted horses. No hoof-beats or any other sound came to them on the summer night’s still air.

Shamefacedly the men looked at one another. Then, without a word, they set off at a walk for their camp, five miles away.

* * * * *

Dawn was breaking as Dad rode into a tent-street and up its long, straight course. At his side was a Union cavalry captain whom he had encountered when the first sentry and corporal of the guard at Hooker’s outposts had halted him.

On a little rise of ground, from which the streets of tents fell away on every side, was a farmhouse, commandeered by Major-General Hooker as temporary headquarters. And into a front room of this house, five minutes after his arrival, Dad was conducted.

General Hooker was picturesquely clad in a mere fraction of his uniform and was gulping down large mouthfuls of very black and very hot coffee from a tin dipper. In his other hand was a slice of unbuttered bread.

“Sergeant James Dadd, of the Blankth Ohio Infantry,” announced Dad, saluting, “with dispatches from Brigadier-General----”

He paused in consternation midway in his formal announcement.

To his amaze, General Hooker set down his portable breakfast on a window-sill, gaped in wonder for an instant at the courier, then burst into a fit of unextinguishable laughter.

“The dispatches, sir,” volunteered Dad, “are of the utmost importance, so I was told by General----”

“Importance!” gasped Hooker, weak with laughter. “Oh, man! _Importance?_ Do you mean to say he didn’t tell you? Didn’t you even _guess_?”