What a devil will you make of this?"

He had drawn the scattered embers together, fanning them ablaze again,
and had sought and found the arrow. It was a blunt-head reed and no war
shaft. And around the middle of it, tightly wrapped and tied with silken
threads, was a little scroll of parchment.

"'Tis the Catawba's arrow," said Jennifer, though how he knew I could
not guess; and then he cut the threads to free the scroll.

Unrolled and spread at large, the parchment proved to be that map of
Captain Stuart's that I had found and lost again. And on the margin of
it was my note to Jennifer, written in that trying moment when the
bribed sentry waited at the door and my sweet lady stood trembling
beside me, murmuring her "Holy Marys."

"Read it," said I. "It explains itself. Tarleton had laid me by the
heels to wait for the hangman, and I would have passed the word about
the Indian-arming on to you. But my messenger was overhauled, and--"

"Yes, yes," he broke in; "I've spelled it out. But this line added at
the bottom--surely, that is never your crabbed fist. By heaven! 'tis in
Madge's hand!"

He knelt to hold it closer to the flickering firelight, and we
deciphered it together. It was but a line, as he had said, with neither
greeting nor leave-taking, address nor signature.

"If this should come into the hands of any true-hearted gentleman"--here
was a blot as if the pen had slipped from the fingers holding it; and
then, in French, the very wording of the inarticulate cry that had come
to me out of the darkness and silence: "_A moi! pour l'amour de Dieu!_"

We fell apart, each to his own side of the handful of embers.

"You make it out?" said I, after a moment of strained silence.

He nodded. "She has prattled the parlez-vous to me ever since we were
boy and maid together."

A full minute more of the threatening silence, and at the end of it we
were glaring at each other like two wild creatures crouching for the
spring.

It was Jennifer who spoke first. "'Twas meant for me," he said; and his
voice had the warning of a mastiff's growl in it.

"No!" said I, curtly.

"I say it was!"

"Then you say the thing which is not."

Had I been Richard Jennifer, I know not what bitter reproach I should
have found to hurl at the man who had thrice owed his life to me. But he
said no word of what had gone before.

"You may give me the lie, if you like, John Ireton; I shall not strike
you." He said it slowly, but his