Cardigan

"Better that than serve as silly tools for Dunmore!" I retorted hotly.

"Dunmore!" sneered Mount. "We his tools, when the silly ass hasn't wits to twiddle his own thumbs?"

"He had the wit to send Butler to stop me!" I answered, bitterly.

Mount began to grin again and wink his eyes slyly.

"Butler came for something else, too," he said. "Dunmore's suite travelled south the day you left, and ought to be in Fortress Pitt by this hour to-morrow."

"What of it?" I asked.

"Ay, that's it, you see. Since you left Johnstown, all are talking of the new beauty who threw over Walter Butler – what's her name – a certain Miss Warren, ward of Sir William; and it is commonly reported that the dispute over the Indians and the quarrel betwixt Butler and Sir William stopped the match."

"What of it!" I broke out, hoarsely.

"Only that this beautiful Miss Warren came with Lord Dunmore's suite to Pittsburg, and Walter Butler has openly boasted he will marry her spite of Sir William or the devil himself. And here is the lady – and here comes her rash gallant tumbling after his jill!"

To hear her name in the southern wilderness, to hear these things in this place, told coarsely, told with a wink and a leer, raised such a black fury in me that I could scarce see the man before me. As for speaking, my throat closed and my breast heaved as though to burst the very straps on my pack. Oh, that I had killed Butler! I clutched my rifle and glared into the gray waste of misty trees. Somewhere out there that devil was lurking; and when I had fulfilled my trust I would seek him and end everything for good and all.

"Are you certain that Miss Warren is already in Pittsburg?" I managed to ask.

"We saw the ladies and the escort a week since," said Mount. "The trail is good for horses below Crown Gap, and they were well mounted, ay, nobly horsed, ladies and troopers, by Heaven! Was it not a splendid sight, Cade?"

"Gay and godless," replied the Weasel, buckling the straps on his pack more tightly and shifting the weight with a grunt. "Are you ready, Jack?"

Mount looked at me.

"Join us and welcome," he said, briefly. "It's safer than going alone. Our friend, Mr. Sheriff Butler, will be watching for us, and we mustn't keep the gentleman on tenter-hooks too long, eh, Cade?"

"Certainly not," said Cade; and we moved off due west, Mount leading, then Shemuel the peddler, then I, the Weasel trotting furtively in the rear.

At times the little peddler twisted his greasy neck to look back at me with an inscrutable expression that puzzled me; but he said nothing, so I only scowled at him, meaning to imply my disgust at his treachery. However, as we strung out through the forest, I quickened my pace and came up beside him, saying, "It was not very wise of you, Shemuel; the next time you come to our house you get no permit to peddle."

"Ach!" he said, spreading his fingers in deprecation, "don'd speag aboud it, Mr. Cardigan. Sir William he has giff me so many permids mitout a shilling to pay. Oh, sir, he iss a grand gendleman, Sir William, ain't he?"

"What made you betray my name and quality then, Shemuel?" I asked, curiously.

His small eyes sought mine, then dropped meekly, as he plodded on in silence. Nor could I get another word from him; so I fell back into my place, with a glance at the sun, which was still shining directly in my face.

"The Fort Pitt trail lies west by south," I suggested, over my shoulder, to the Weasel.

"There's a shorter cut to Cresap," he replied, cunningly.

"Shorter than the Pitt trail?" I asked, astonished.

"Shorter because healthier," he returned. And, answering my puzzled smile, he added, "A long life on a long trail, but there's ever a shorter cut to the gibbet!"

Mount, who had fallen back beside us, grinned at me and rubbed his nose.

"Butler will be sitting up like a bereaved catamount in the Pitt trail for us," he said. "I've no powder to waste on him and his crew. However, Mr. Cardigan, if you want to take a long shot, now's your chance to mark their hides."

He took me by the arm and led me cautiously a few rods to the left, then crouched down and parted the bushes with his hand. We were kneeling on the very edge of a precipice which I never should have seen, and over which I certainly should have walked had I been here alone. Deep down below us the Ohio flowed, a dark, slow stream, with jutting rocks on the eastern bank and a long flat sand-spit on the west.

At the point of this spit a man was standing, leaning on a rifle. It was not Butler.

"There's another fellow on that rock," whispered Mount, pointing. "Butler will be watching the slope below our camp."

"Let him watch it," observed the Weasel; "we'll be with Cresap by moon-rise!"

"You can take a safe shot from here," smiled Mount, looking around at me; "but it's too far to go for the scalp."

I shook my head, shuddering, and we resumed our march, filing away into the west in perfect silence until the sun stood in mid-heaven and the heated air under the great pines drove us to the nearest water, which I had been sniffing for some time past.

Resting there to drink, I looked curiously at my three companions. Such a company I had never beheld. There was the notorious Mount, a giant in stringy buckskins, with a paw like a bear and a smooth, boyish face cut by the single, heavy crease of a scar below the right eye. With his regular features and indolent movements, he appeared to me like some overgrown village oaf, too stupid to work, too lazy to try.

Beside him squatted the little Jew, toes turned in, dirty thumbs joined pensively, musing in his red beard. His boots had left the foreign mark which I had seen the day before in the trail; the Weasel's moccasins were those of Albany make.

I examined the Weasel. Such a shrunken, serene, placid little creature, all hunting-shirt and cap, with two finely chiselled flat ears, which perhaps gave him that alert allure, as though eternally listening to some sound behind his back.

But the mouths of these three men were curiously well made, bespeaking a certain honesty which I began to believe they perhaps possessed after all. Even Shemuel's mouth, under his thin, red beard, was not the mouth of treachery, though the lips were shrewd enough, God wot!

"Well," cried Mount suddenly, "what do you think of us?"

Somewhat embarrassed, I replied politely, but Mount shook his head.

"You were thinking, what a row of gallows-birds for an honest man to flock with! Eh? Oh, don't deny it. You can't hurt my feelings, but you might hurt the Weasel's – eh, Cade?"

"I have sensitive feelings," said the Weasel dryly.

"I think you all stood by me when I was in distress," said I. "I ask no more of my friends than that."

"Well, you're a good lad," said Mount, getting to his feet and patting my shoulder as he passed me.

"Give him something to wreck his life and he'd make a rare ranger," observed the Weasel.

"Cade was in love," explained Mount soberly; "weren't you Cade?"

The weazened little man nodded his head and looked up at me sentimentally.

"Yes," went on Mount, "Cade was in love and got married. His wife ran away somewheres – didn't she Cade?"

Again the little creature nodded, looking soberly at me for sympathy.

"And then," continued Mount, "he just hunted around till he found me, and we went to hell together – didn't we, Cade, old friend?"

Two large tears stole down the Weasel's seamy cheeks. He rubbed them off with his smoky fists, leaving smears beside his nose.

"She took our baby, too," he sniffed; "you forgot that, Jack."