or the screechin', one bazoo's as good as a dozen, if
so be ye blow it fierce enough."

"'Twas cut and dried beforehand," Dick explained. "I had an inkling of
what was afoot from Ephraim, here, whom I stumbled on when I dropped
from the stair window that Madge opened for me. He went to set his
one-man ambush whilst I was trying to warn you."

"So," said I. "Our skins are whole, but after all we have come off with
never a word to take back to Dan Morgan--unless you have the word."

"Not I," Dick said, ruefully.

The old man chuckled again.

"Ye ain't old enough, neither one o' ye, ez I allow. It takes a right
old person to fish out the innards of an inimy's secrets. Colonel
Tarleton, hoss, foot and dragoons, with the seventh rigiment and a part
o' the seventy-first, will take the big road for Dan Morgan's camp
to-morrow at sun-up. And right soon atterwards, Gin'ral Cornwallis'll
foller on. Is that what you youngsters was trying to find out?"

XLVII

ARMS AND THE MAN

In that book he wrote--the book in which he never so much as names the
name of Ireton--my Lord Cornwallis's commissary-general, Charles
Stedman, damns Colonel Tarleton in a most gentlemanly manner for his
ill-success at the Cowpens, and would charge to his account personal the
failure of Cornwallis's plan to crush in detail the patriot Army of the
South.

Now little as I love, or have cause to love, Sir Banastre
Tarleton,--they tell me he has been knighted and now wears a
major-general's sword-knot,--'tis but the part of outspoken honest
enmity to say that we owed the victory at the Cowpens to no remissness
on the part of the young legion commander who, if he were indeed the
most brutal, was also the most active and enterprising of Lord
Cornwallis's field officers.

No, it was no remissness nor lack of bravery on the part of the enemy.
'Twas only that the tide had turned. King's Mountain had been fought and
won, and there were to be no more Camdens for us.

In the affair at the cow pastures, which followed hard upon Richard's
and my return from our flying visit to Winnsborough, the very elements
fought for us and against the British. As for instance: Tarleton, with
his famous legion of horse, and infantry enough to make his numbers
exceed ours, began his march on the eleventh and was rained on and mired
for four long days before he had crossed the Broad and had come within
scouting distance of us.

Left to himself, Dan Morgan would ha