h a stunned man to his senses, as they will
tell you who have seen the rack applied: one is to slack the tension on
the cracking joints and minister cordials to the victim; the other to
give the straining winch a crueller twist. It was not the gentler way my
captors took, as you would guess; and when I came to know and see and
feel again a pair of them were kicking me alive, and I was sore and
aching from their buffetings.

How long a time came in between my futile dash for liberty and this
harsh preface to their dragging of me back to the manor house, I could
not tell. It must have been an hour or more, for now a gibbous moon hung
pale above the tree-tops, and all around were bivouac fires and horses
tethered to show that in the interval a troop had come and camped.

The scene within the great fore-room of the house had been shifted, too.
A sentry was pacing back and forth before the door--a Hessian grenadier
by the size and shako of him; and when the two trooper bailiffs thrust
me in, and I had winked and blinked my eyes accustomed to the
candle-light, I saw the table had been swept of its bottles and glasses,
and around it, sitting as in council, were some half-score officers of
the British light-horse with their colonel at the head.

As it chanced, this was my first sight near at hand Of that British
commander whose name in after years the patriot mothers spoke to fright
their children. He did not look a monster. As I recall him now, he was a
short, square-bodied man, younger by some years than myself, and yet
with an old campaigner's head well set upon aggressive shoulders. His
eyes were black and ferrety; and his face, well seasoned by the Carolina
sun, was swart as any Arab's. A man, I thought, who could be
gentle-harsh or harsh-revengeful, as the mood should prompt; who could
make well-turned courtier compliments to a lady and damn a trooper in
the self-same breath.

This was that Colonel Banastre Tarleton who gave no quarter to
surrendered men; and when I looked into the sloe-black eyes I saw in
them for me a waiting gibbet.

"So!" he rapped out, when I was haled before him. "You're the spying
rebel captain, eh? Are you alive enough to hang?"

His lack of courtesy rasped so sorely that I must needs give place to
wrath and answer sharply that there was small doubt of it, since I could
stand and curse him.

He scowled at that and cursed me back again as heartily as any
fishwife. Then suddenly he changed h