ans and your cargo."

Falconnet's oath was of impatience.

"We've waited now a month and more like men with halters round their
necks. The country is alive with rebels."

Whereupon Captain Stuart began to explain at large how the northern
route had been chosen for its very hazards, the better to throw the
partizans off the scent. I listened, eager for every word, but when the
horses stirred behind me I was set back upon the oft-recurrent
under-thought of how the gloom did also hide a silent figure lying
prone, with the three bridle reins knotted round its wrist.

But though the unnerving under-thought would not begone, the scene
within the great room held me fast by eye and ear. The master and his
factor sat apart, their heads together over the knotty problem of
subsistence for the convoy troop. At the table-end, with the bottle
gurgling now at one right hand and now at another, the three king's men
drank confusion to the rebels, and in the intervals discussed the
powder-convoy's route across the mountains. The senior plotter had some
map or chart of his own making, and he was pricking out on it for
Falconnet the route agreed upon in council with the Cherokees.

At this cool outlaying of the working plan, some proper sense of what
this plot of savage-arming meant to every undefended cabin on the
frontier seized and thrilled me. I knew, as every border-born among us
knew, the dismal horrors of an Indian massacre; and this these men were
planning was treacherous murder on an unwarned people. All was to be
done in midnight secrecy. Supplied with ammunition, the Cherokees, led
by this Captain Stuart or some other, were first to fall upon the
over-mountain settlements. These laid waste, the Indians were to form a
junction with the army of invasion, and so to add the torch and tomahawk
and scalping knife to British swords and muskets.

It was a plot to make the blood run cold in my veins, or in the veins of
any man who knew the cruel temper of these savages; and when I thought
upon the fate of my poor countrymen beyond the mountains, I saw what lay
before me.

The settlers must be warned in time to fight or fly.

But while I listened, with every faculty alert to reckon with the task
of rescue, I take no shame in saying that the problem balked me. Lacking
the strength to mount and ride in my own proper person, there was
nothing for it but to find a messenger; and who would he be in a region
at the moment distraught wi