too. Sit you down and fill another pipe. Whatever the quarrel, it is mine."

"Mayhap; but it is mine, too," he broke in, angrily. "At all events, I'll see this king's volunteer well hanged before I second him in such a cause."

"That as you choose. But you are bound in honor, are you not?"

"No." He filled a fresh pipe, lighted it with a coal from the hearth, and puffed away in silence for a time. When he spoke again it was not as Falconnet's next friend.

"What you have told me puts a new face on the matter, Jack. Sir Francis may find him another second where he can. If he has aught to say, I shall tell him plain he lied to me about the quarrel, as he did. Now who is there to see fair play on your side, John Ireton?"

At the question an overwhelming sense of my own sorry case grappled me. Fifteen years before, I had left Appleby Hundred and my native province as well befriended as the son of Roger Ireton was sure to be. And now—

"Dick, my lad, I am like to fight alone," said I.

He swore again at that; and here, lest I should draw my loyal Richard as he was not, let me say, once for all, that his oaths were but the outgushings of a warm and impulsive heart, rarely bitter, and never, as I believe, backed by surly rancor or conscious irreverence.

"That you shall not, Jack," he asserted, stoutly. "I must be a-gallop now to tell this king's captain to look elsewhere for his next friend; but to-morrow morning I'll meet you in the road between this and the Stair outlands, and we'll fare on together."

After this he would brook no more delay; and when Tomas had fetched his horse I saw him mount and ride away under the low-hanging maples—watched him fairly out of sight in the green and gold twilight of the great forest before turning back to my lonely hearth and its somber reminders.

I stirred the dying embers, throwing on a pine knot for better light. Then I took down my father's sword from its deer-horn brackets over the chimney-piece, and set myself to fine its edge and point with a bit of Scotch whinstone. It was a good blade; a true old Andrea Ferara got in battle in the seventeenth century by one of the Nottingham Iretons.

I whetted it well and carefully. It was not that I feared my enemy's strength of wrist or tricks of fence; but fighting had been my trade, and he is but a poor craftsman who looks not well to see that his tools are in order against their time of using.

II
WHICH KNITS UP SOME BROKEN ENDS

It was in the autumn of the year '64, as I was coming of age, that my father made ready to send me to England. Himself a conscience exile from Episcopal Virginia, and a descendant of those Nottingham Iretons whose best-known son fought stoutly against Church and King under Oliver Cromwell, he was yet willing to humor my bent and to use the interest of my mother's family to enter me in the king's service.

Accordingly, I took ship at Norfolk for "home," as we called it in those days; and, after a stormy passage and overmuch waiting as my cousins' guest in Lincolnshire, had my pair of colors in the Scots Blues, lately home from garrison duty in the Canadas.

Of the life in barracks of a young ensign with little wit and less wisdom, and with more guineas in his purse than was good for him, the less said the better. But of this you may like to know that, what with a good father's example, and some small heritage of Puritan decency come down to me from the sound-hearted old Roundhead stock, I won out of that devil's sponging-house, an army in the time of peace, with somewhat less to my score than others had to theirs.

It was in this barrack life that I came to know Richard Coverdale and his evil genius, the man Francis Falconnet. Coverdale was an ensign in my own regiment, and we were sworn friends from the first. His was a clean soul and a brave; and it was to him that I owed escape from many of the grosser chargings on that score above-named.

As for Falconnet, he was even then a ruffler and a bully, though he was not of the army. He was a younger son, and at that time there were two lives between him and the baronetcy; but with a mother's bequeathings to purchase idleness and to gild his iniquities, he was a fair example of the jeunesse dorée of that England; a libertine, a gamester, a rakehell; brave as the tiger is brave, and to the full as pitiless. He was a boon companion of the officers' mess; and for a time—and purpose—posed as Coverdale's friend, and mine.

Since I would not tell my poor Dick's story to Richard Jennifer, I may not set it down in cold words here for you. It was the age-old tragic comedy of a false friend's treachery and a woman's weakness; a duel, and the wrong man slain. And you may know this; that Falconnet's most merciful role in it was the part he played one chill November morning when he put Richard Coverdale to the wall and ran him through.

As you have guessed, I was Coverdale's next friend and second in this affair, and but for the upsetting news of the Tryon tyranny in Carolina,—news which reached me on the very day of the meeting,—I should there and then have called the slayer to his account.

How my father who, Presbyterian and Ireton though he was, had always been of the king's side, came to espouse the cause of the "Regulators," as they called themselves, I know not. In my youthful memories of him he figures as the feudal lord of his own domain, more absolute than many of the petty kinglings I came afterward to know in the German marches. But this, too, I remember; that while his rule at Appleby Hundred was stern and despotic enough, he was ever ready to lend a willing ear to any tale of oppression. And if what men say of the tyrant Tryon's tax-gatherers and law-court robbers be no more than half truth, there was need for any honest gentleman to oppose them.

What that opposition came to in '71 is now a tale twice told. Taken in arms against the governor's authority, and with an estate well worth receiving, my father had little justice and less mercy accorded him. With many others he was outlawed; his estates were declared forfeit; and a few days later he, with Benjamin Merrill and four more captivated at the Alamance, was given some farce of a trial and hanged.

When the news of this came to me you may well suppose that I had no heart to continue in the service of the king who could sanction and reward such villainies as these of the butcher William Tryon. So I threw up my lieutenant's commission in the Blues, took ship for the Continent, and, after wearing some half-dozen different uniforms in Germany, was lucky enough to come at length to serviceable blows under my old field-marshal on the Turkish frontier.

To you of a younger generation, born in the day of swift mail-coaches and well-kept post-roads, the slowness with which our laggard news traveled in that elder time must needs seem past belief. It was early in the year '79 before I began to hear more than vague camp-fire tales of the struggle going on between the colonies and the mother country; and from that to setting foot once more upon the soil of my native Carolina was still another year.

What I found upon landing at New Berne and saw while riding a jog-trot thence to the Catawba was a province rent and torn by partizan warfare. Though I came not once upon the partizans themselves in all that long faring, there were trampled fields and pillaged houses enough to serve as mile-stones; and in my native Mecklenburg a mine full charged, with slow-match well alight for its firing.

Charleston had fallen, and Colonel Tarleton's outposts were already widespread on the upper waters of the Broad and the Catawba. Thus it was that the first sight which greeted my eyes when I rode into Queensborough was the familiar trappings of my old service, and I was made to know that in spite of Mr. Jefferson's boldly written Declaration of Independence, and that earlier casting of the