ghout the passage perilous.

By good hap we came to the crossing of the cavern stream without meeting
any foeman; and on the farther side of the shallow ford we found the old
borderer awaiting us.

"Ez I allow, we've smelt the bait in the trap and come off with whole
bones, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego," he said, mixing metaphor,
Scripture phrase and frontier idiom as was his wont. Then he put a leg
over his horse and gave the stirrup-word: "From now on, old Jehu, the
son o' Nimshi, is the hoss-whipper we've got to beat. Get ye behind,
Cap'n John, and give the hoss that lags a half inch 'r so of your
sword-p'int."

Then and there began a night flight long to be remembered. Down the
valley of the swift river to the ford where Yeates and I had crossed
after the mock rescue of Margery the night before, we let the horses
pick the way as they could. But once beyond the ford, where the trace
was wider and the footing less precarious, we plied whip and spur,
pushing the saddle-beasts for every stride we could get out of them in
the blind race.

I have marveled often that we came not once to grief in all this long
night-gallop through the darkness. There was every chance for it. The
over-arching trees of the great forest shut out all the starlight, and
the trace was no more than a bridle-path, rougher than any cart road.
Yet we held the breakneck pace steadily, save for the time it took to
thread some steep defile to a stream crossing, or to scramble up its
fellow on the opposite side; and when the dawn began to gray in the sky
ahead, we were well out of the broken mountain region and into the
opener forest of the hill country.

The sun was yet below the eastern horizon when we came to the fording of
a larger stream than any we had crossed in the night. Its course was
toward the sunrise, hence I took it for some tributary of the Catawba
or the Broad.

"'Tis the Broad itself," said Ephraim Yeates, in answer to my asking;
"and yit it ain't; leastwise, it ain't the one you know. 'Tis the one
the Parley-voos claimed in the old war, and they call it the Frinch
Broad."

"But that flows north and westward, if I remember aright," said I.

"So it do, so it do--in gineral. But hereabouts 'twill run all ways for
Sunday, by spells."

"If this be the French Broad we are not yet out of the Tuckasege
country, as I take it."

"Mighty nigh to it; nigh enough to make camp for a resting spell. I
reckon ye're a-needing that sa