I looked to the road again. The southern body
was small, not more than a score, compact, riding
smartly but with military order and precision.
The man at their head, the officer in command, no
doubt, spurred on and began to shout at the oncoming
northerners. He might as well have spoken fair
words to an avalanche, and the men behind him began
to waver and most of them pulled up. It was useless.
The torrent swept into them and bore them backward,
tumbling some of them over, men and horses together,
but incorporating most of them in its own madness.
In less than five minutes the last batch of dragooners
had cursed and spurred themselves out of sight, and
the bright moon shone down on a road once more bare
and white save for a few scattered patches of black.
The Colonel uncovered the mare’s head and nuzzled
her. All he said was, but that very gleefully,
“Geordie, my boy, I’ll be routing you out
of St. James’s within the fortnight. I’ll
learn you to neglect the King of Sweden’s Colonels!
Damme, Oliver, it made me think of Pharaoh’s
kine—one lot eating the other up.
Now, sweetheart my Madge, we’ll have your pretty
eyes a-bye-bye in no time.”
“I never saw anything so funny in my life,”
said Margaret. “On with your coat, Oliver,
before you take cold.”
From all of which I learned to take, as they did,
the fat with the lean in soldiering, and not to care
a brass farthing which it was. Still, I was as
yet so young at the game, that, though I was careful
to swagger it out and say nothing, I did wonder why
the body from the south was so small.
And I wonder as I write whether it was or was not
the mistake of my life merely to wonder then.
CHAPTER XIV
“Warhasitsrisks”
I slept unsoundly and in snatches. Margaret was
in the room beneath me, “dreaming in Italian,”
thought I, in unhappy imitation of her dainty gibe
at her father. A problem was on my mind, and that
was ever with me an enemy to sleep. I meant being
the best of soldiers, and this that worried me was
a military problem. To be short, I could not help
asking myself, “Were the dragoons from the south
intended as a reinforcement to the horse from the
north?” And somehow I could not think they were.
As the top-dog spirit in me put it: “It
was like sending Jack to reinforce me. Quod est
absurdum.”
Time the Explainer permits me to be frank. There
was this other side to my problem that I could not
bring myself to be sure the Colonel’s escape
had come merely by happy chance. He was no party
to contriving it, of that I never doubted, but it
did look like a contrivance. We had been at the
“Rising Sun” for six hours or more.
Stone, the nearest head-quarters of Cumberland’s
forces, was only nine miles south of it, yet no attempt
had been made to follow the fugitive. No, thought
I again, that’s wrong. Weir was sent on
his track and actually found him. But this was
as useless, so it seemed, as sending twenty dragoons,
hundreds being available, to reinforce a thousand
stout horse. There was no proportion between the
ends proposed and the means adopted.
