seeing of her
will surely set a thing in train that will make her yours and not mine.
Get your leave and come with me on your own terms. Mayhap she will show
you how little she cares for me, and how much she cares for you."

So this is how it came about that we two, garbed as decent planters and
mounted upon the sleekest cobs the regiment afforded, took the road for
Winnsborough together on a certain summer-fine morning in January in the
year of battles, seventeen hundred and eighty-one.

XLV

IN WHICH WE FIND WHAT WE NEVER SOUGHT

'Tis fifty miles as a bird would fly it from the grazing uplands of the
Broad known as the Cowpens to the lower plantation region lying between
that stream and the farther Catawba or Wateree; and Richard Jennifer and
I ambled the distance leisurely, as befitted our mission and disguise,
cutting the journey evenly in half for the first night's lodging, which
we had at the house of one Philbrick--as hot a Tory as we pretended to
be.

From our host of the night we learned that within two days the British
outposts on the Wateree and the Broad had been advanced; and there were
rumors in the air that Lord Cornwallis, who was hourly expecting General
Leslie with two thousand of Sir Henry Clinton's men from New York, would
presently move on to the long-deferred conquest of North Carolina.

"Has Cornwallis lost his wits?" Dick would say, when we were a-jog on
the southward road again. "'Tis a braver lordling than I gave him credit
for being--if he will put his head in a trap that will close behind him
and cut him off from his line and base."

I laughed. "You may wager Jennifer House against an acre of the Cowpens
that Lord Charles will do no such unsoldierly thing. If this rumor be
true, we have heard only the half of it."

"And the other half will be?--"

"That my Lord Cornwallis will do his prettiest to pull the teeth of one
or the other of the trap-jaws before he trusts himself within them."

Jennifer was silent for an ambling minute or two. Then he said: "'Twill
be our teeth he'll try to pull, then. The Broad is nearer than the
Pedee; and ours is the weaker of the two jaws."

"Right you are," said I. "And now we know what we have to discover."

"Anan?" he queried.

"We must learn by hook or crook who is to be sent against Dan Morgan,
and when."

"That should be easy--if the use of it afterward be not choked out of us
at a rope's end."

"We can divide the rope's-end chanc