War Drums (Sass)/Chapter 20
IT WAS early afternoon when Jolie awoke. "See, I my sweet, what Meg has for you," said Mistress Pearson, smiling down at the girl, eyes twinkling in her tanned, lined face. Jolie, blinking sleepy lids, beheld a fringed buckskin shirt, new and spotless, elaborately inset with red and blue, belted with green.
"I bought it six months ago," Meg continued, "of a half-breed woman in the Chicasaw nation, and I intended it for a slim lad I know at Fort Prince George. It has never been worn and it should fit you fairly well."
Jolie donned it gleefully; the buckskin leggins, too, that Meg had magically provided; but the smallest pair of moccasins upon which Mistress Pearson had been able to lay her hands were much too large for Jolie's feet, so for the present she must stick to her own riding boots. A broad-brimmed hat of soft beaver skin, dyed green, into which Meg had thrust a jaunty feather from a wild turkey's wing, completed the girl's new costume; and when she stepped out of the tent and made her bow, Lachlan, who was waiting just without, saw not a woman but a slim, straight youth garbed like a wilderness hunter—a boy, more beautiful than any boy, whose eyes sought his and challenged them.
"How do I look?" she asked him impudently, one hand on her hip, the other twirling an imaginary moustache.
He stood dumb with amazement. For the life of him he could find no word. It was Mr. Francis O'Sullivan who broke the silence.
"Mam'selle," he chirped, sweeping off his hat and bending low before her, "sure, you have struck him speechless, but I bid you find your answer in the pitiful face of him. Mam'selle, I do assure you with my hand upon my heart that you are the most heavenly thing these eyes have seen at all, at all."
"I thank you, sir, for your handsome speech," said Jolie with a curtsey, "and no thanks to you, Mr. Tie-Tongue, at all, at all. And because he likes not my looks and is frowning at me like an ogre, I choose for my riding companion Mr. Almayne."
So, with Jolie riding by Almayne's side—riding astride after the manner of a man—the pack train resumed its journey. There was a purpose underneath her whim. There were questions that she wished to ask and that only Almayne could answer. He answered grudgingly at first, with an underlying hostility concealed yet plainly evident; but exerting, yet not overplaying, her charm, she got what she wanted out of him, and much more besides, so that she rode with him for an hour or longer. This done, she dared Lachlan to a race and they galloped ahead of the party. Drawing rein, she talked with Lachlan, as they moved slowly on, about the task that lay ahead of them, asking him many questions, drawing from him in rough outline his and Almayne's plans for the rescue of Barradell.
There was another question that she planned to ask him but it was one that had to be led up to with some care; and gradually, as they rode on a hundred yards ahead of the pack train, the spell of the wilderness took hold upon her. Gradually she forgot her own concerns and a certain vague doubt which, since her conversation with Almayne, had shaped itself in her mind. Slowly her anxieties faded, and in their place came a languid dream-like content which deepened as the afternoon wore on. The feeling came to her that all sorrow and evil had been left behind—that she was riding through the Garden of God towards happiness and her lost lover and the fulfilment of her dreams.
Truly, it was like God's Garden, that springtime wilderness of Carolina where the white man's axe was yet unknown. It was a garden abloom not only with flowers but with birds more beautiful than golden jessamine or pink Indian rose; a garden not still and silent as most gardens are but astir with abundant life, aquiver with innumerable voices.
There were places where all was silent. Sometimes the trail led through lofty pine woods, carpeted with fern, where the giant trees towered eighty feet without a limb, woods that were vast cathedrals too holy for the little singing birds. But on that day's journey the pine groves through which they passed were of comparatively small extent, so that soon they emerged from the dim, hushed cathedral places into a sunnier broad-leafed forest where the ground was sprinkled with blossoms and the foliage was alive with wings. Here the air throbbed with bird-music; troops of gray squirrels ran and leaped amid the wide-spreading branches; white-tailed deer, grazing in herds of a dozen or more, lifted their shapely heads to stand at gaze for a moment and then go bounding off along the winding, moss-tapestried forest aisles.
To Jolie it was as strange as it was beautiful. There had been birds in England, too, but never such birds as these. Now it was a crested cardinal, red as blood against a bank of lustrous laurel; now it was a gorgeous nonpareil, crimson and blue and shimmering yellow-green, glittering in the sun like a jewel of changing hues; now it was a ruby-throated hummingbird poised above a golden flower on wings that whirred so rapidly that the eye could not see them; now it was some tiny, fragile warbler from the tropical lands, in whose dazzling plumage all the tints of the sunrise seemed to have been imprisoned. All these delighted her; but stranger by far were the tall turkey cocks that she saw striding along the vistas of the woods to the right or to the left or ahead; and most strange and most lovely of all was a great flock of parrakeets that came screaming through the forest and, alighting on the ground, covered the turf with a living carpet of rich green and vivid gold.
To Jolie it seemed that there was nothing to mar this loveliness. Out of this singing, many-coloured wilderness, this green and silver wilderness to which the long, graceful pendants of the Spanish moss imparted a misty beauty never known in England, scarcely a hint of menace came to her. Twice she saw wolves of the small low-country breed slinking along like homeless dogs under the far-spaced trees; and once, glancing down a long glade in the woods, through which trickled a small sluggish stream, she saw a big black bear stand for a moment watching with lowered head, then turn and whisk himself with surprising quickness behind a tree trunk.
The wolves she had already learned to despise, but to her eyes the bear seemed very big. She turned, glanced at Lachlan, perceived that he, too, had seen the animal. But he only smiled and made some light remark about Bruin's nimbleness in getting out of sight; and the sense of danger which had come to her momentarily vanished, and she gave herself again to silent and bemused enjoyment of the changing scene about her.
So, mile after mile, she rode in silence, Lachlan at her side or just behind her, the pack train following well in the rear, Almayne, Jock and Meg Pearson, and Mr. O'Sullivan riding at its head.
An hour before sunset, when the western sky flamed beyond the tree trunks, they came to a long savannah stretching away to their left, walled in on either side by the woods. It opened before them suddenly, as they rode out from behind a dense hedge of myrtle; and as Jolie's eye lit upon it she saw its surface heave upward and her ears were full of the surge of wings. A thousand ibises and herons had taken flight, sweeping upward from the moist ground on powerful swiftly beating pinions, whirling and circling in the air, their white plumage gleaming in the late light, the long, curved, crimson bills of the ibises shining like coral. For a long moment Jolie watched them, spellbound; then, when the last of them were vanishing amid the trees, she turned to Lachlan, and he marvelled at the light in her eyes.
"And this," she said, "is the wilderness of which Almayne thought that I would be afraid. I never dreamed of anything so beautiful."
He paused for a moment before answering.
"You do not know it yet," he said. "It is beautiful and this part of it is safe. But it has claws and fangs and—other things. You will know it better soon?"
"I am not afraid of it," she answered quickly; and then more slowly: "There is only one thing of which I am now afraid."
"And that?" asked Lachlan curiously.
"I am afraid of what we may find at our journey's end."
Lachlan read no obscure meaning in the words. He had been frank in pointing out to her the difficulties and dangers of their enterprise, the possibility of failure in their attempt to rescue Gilbert Barradell; and he thought that this was what was in her mind now, and a great sympathy for her welled up in him.
He answered her cheerfully.
"Our task is no light one," he said, "but I think we shall succeed. Almayne has no equal in Carolina, and my two warriors are the pick of the Muskogee braves. In all America I know of no better men for this work than these three."
They were riding onward again side by side, and for a little space Jolie said no more. But her gaze no longer wandered along the forest glades; her eyes were fixed in front of her. Just under the red-gold curls beneath her broad-brimmed hat there was the ghost of a frown.
Suddenly the frown—if frown it was—vanished and her eyes were lit with laughter.
"You are a handsome man, Lachlan McDonald," she said lightly, "though I should not tell you so and risk turning your head. And there is a panther's grace and a lithe comeliness in your two tall warriors, Striking Hawk and Little Mink. Now I am curious about my own sex among your people. It happens that since I have been in America I have seen no young Indian girl. Tell me, Mr. McDonald, are your Indian maidens as comely as your men?"
"There are those among them," he answered gravely, "who are far comelier. They are slim and straight, and some are tall and very beautiful."
"And some?" she asked, "have married English husbands?"
"Aye, and French husbands and men from Scotland and from Ireland," Lachlan replied; and he told her then of how the Frenchman, Captain Tourville, had married a Muskogee princess of the Family of Wind, the most exalted of the Muskogee clans; of their beautiful daughter, Sehoy Tourville, herself a princess; and of the Scotsman who came to Tallasee and fell in love with Sehoy and married her and became High Chief or King of the Muskogee Confederacy.
"That Scotsman," he concluded, "is my father, and Sehoy is my mother, and she is as beautiful now as she was then."
"Yes," Jolie replied absently, "all this I know. Almayne told me these things and of how you are the Prince of your nation, and of how you are going back to your people now and will some day become their King."
He nodded, smiling. Presently she turned her face to him again.
"What know you?" she asked carelessly, "of Chief Concha's daughter? Is she one of those slim, tall ones who are so beautiful?"
She waited, her eyes searching his face eagerly; and when no answer came, she leaned towards him.
"You will recall," she said impatiently, "that when you sat the first time in Falcon's cabin, he mentioned this daughter of Concha, the Appalache Chief. It is about her that I inquire. Is she comely? There is a reason why I ask."
"I do not know," Lachlan replied slowly. "I have never seen her."
He was frowning, but she met his gaze coolly. She smiled whimsically, the corners of her lips turning down.
"Well, no matter," she cried. "We shall learn about her in time, and meanwhile I shall think of her as very ugly. It will make me happier to picture her so."
"Mam'selle," said Lachlan gravely, "you will pardon me for questioning you. I told you nothing of what happened in Captain Falcon's cabin. I told you nothing of his reference to Chief Concha's daughter. I must ask you where you learned these things?"
She flushed and bit her lip.
"You, must not be angry with Almayne," she said earnestly. "I wormed it out of him. I knew that you had not told me all and I made Almayne tell me. It was not his fault. I had it from him before he realized that he was telling what you had not chosen to tell."
She paused, tapping her boot with the switch that she carried. Presently her eyes dropped.
"But for Almayne," she said softly, "I should not have known how brave a thing you did when you went alone aboard Captain Falcon's ship."
Again she waited, but no answer came.
"I know now," she continued, her rich tones low and flute-like, "that in Lachlan McDonald I have in my service as fearless a gentleman as ever served a lady in distress."
Lachlan's black eyes were stern and hard. He knew that under his swarthy skin the blood suffused his cheeks, and this knowledge added to his anger.
"You have done ill," he said slowly, "and Almayne has done ill. I cannot but blame you both."
She turned to him a pair of flashing eyes.
"Sir," she cried, "I am not accustomed to be scolded!"
A quick answer rose to his lips, but reining in her horse, she cut him short.
"We will wait here," she said, "until the others come."
They sat their horses in silence, neither looking at the other. Two spots of colour blazed in her cheeks, her head was high. On a swaying twig of a willow-oak above the trail a black and russet sanguilla sang an evening song. As Lachlan watched it idly, a blue-gray shape swooped from beyond the tree-top, wings darkened over the singing bird, long claws reached down and snatched it from its perch. Jolie, aware that the song had ceased, glanced upward. She did not see the hawk dashing onward, its victim dangling from its talons.