ON THE ROAD TO TURNER'S
"Who goes there?"
"A jug."
"What kind of a jug?"
"A little brown jug from Kildare."
Thus Mr. Thomas Ardmore tested his pickets with a shibboleth of his own devising. The sturdy militiamen of North Carolina patrolled the northern bank of Raccoon Creek at midnight, aware that that riotous flood alone separated them from their foes. The terraces at Ardsley bristled with the guns of the First Light Battery, while, upon a cot in the wine cellar beneath, Mr. Bill Appleweight, alias Poteet, slept the sleep of the just.
He was rudely aroused, however, at one o'clock in the morning by Ardmore, Cooke and Collins, and taken out through the kitchen to one of the Ardsley farm wagons. Big Paul held the reins, and four of Cooke's detectives were mounted as escort. Ardmore, Cooke and Collins were to accompany the party as a board of strategy in the movement upon Turner Court House, South Carolina.
Appleweight, the terror of the border, blinked at the lanterns that flashed about him in the courtyard. He had been numbed by his imprisonment, and even now he yielded himself docilely to the inevitable. His capture in the first instance at Mount Nebo had been clear enough, and he could have placed his hand on the men who did it if he had been free for a couple of hours. This he had pondered over his solacing solitaire as he sat on the case of Chateau Bizet in the Ardsley wine cellar; but the subsequent events had been altogether too much for him. He had been taken from his original captors by a girl, and while the ignominy of this was not lost on the outlaw, his wits had been unequal to the further fact, which he had no ground for disbelieving, that this captivity within the walls of Ardsley had been due to a daughter of that very governor of North Carolina whom he had counted his friend. Why the girl had interested herself in his seizure and incarceration; why he had been carried to the great house of a New York gentleman whom he had never harmed in the least; and why, more than all, he should have been locked in a room filled with bottles bearing absurd and unintelligible titles, and containing, he had learned by much despairing experiment, liquids that singularly failed to satisfy thirst—these were questions before which Appleweight, alias Poteet, bowed his head helplessly.
"The road between Kildare and Turner's is fairly good," announced Cooke, "though we've got to travel four miles to strike it. Griswold evidently thinks that holding the creek is all there is of this business, and he won't find out till morning that we've crawled round his line and placed Appleweight in jail at Turner's where he belongs."
"You must have a good story ready for the press, Collins," said Ardmore. "The North Carolina border counties don't want Appleweight injured, and Governor Dangerfield don't want any harm to come to him—you may be sure of that, or Bill would have been doing time long ago. The moral element in the larger cities and the people in Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts, who only hear of Appleweight in the newspapers, want him punished, and we must express to them our righteous indignation that he has been kidnapped and dragged away from our vengeance by the governor of South Carolina, who wants him in his own state merely to protect him. We can come pretty near pleasing everybody if you work it right, Collins. Our manner of handling the matter will do much to increase Governor Dangerfield's popularity with all classes."
"Gentlemen, it was very impolite of you not to tell me you were ready to start!" and Jerry came briskly from the side entrance, dressed for the saddle and nibbling a biscuit.
"But you are not to go! I thought that was understood!" cried Ardmore.
"It may have been understood by you, Mr. Ardmore, but not by me! I should never forgive myself if, after all the trouble I have taken to straighten out this little matter, I should not be in at the finish. Will you kindly get me a horse?"
Miss Dangerfield's resolution was not to be shaken, and a few minutes later the party moved out from the courtyard. Cooke rode several hundred yards ahead; then two detectives preceded the wagon, in which Appleweight sat on a cross-seat with two more of Cooke's men on a seat just behind him. He was tied and gagged, and an old derby hat (supplied by Paul) had been clapped upon the side of his head at an angle that gave him a jaunty air belied by his bonds. Though his tongue was silenced, his eyes were at once eloquent of wonderment, resignation and impotent rage. Beside the wagon rode Miss Jerry Dangerfield, alert and contented. Ardmore and Collins were immediately behind her, and she indulged the journalist in some mild chaff from time to time, to his infinite delight, though considerably to Ardmore's distress of heart; for, though no words had passed between him and Jerry as to the disgraceful flight of the adjutant-general, yet the master of Ardsley was in a jealous mood. The moon had left the conspirators to the softer radiance of the stars, but there was sufficient light for Ardmore to mark the gentle lines of Jerry's face, as she lifted it now and then to scan the bright globes above.
Paul drove his team at a trot over the smooth road of the estate to a remote and little-used gate on the southern side, but still safely removed from the South Carolina pickets along the Raccoon.
"It's all right over there," remarked Collins, jerking his head toward the creek. "The fronting armies are waiting for morning and battle. I suppose that when we send word to Griswold that Appleweight is in a South Carolina jail it will change the scene of operations. It will then be Governor Osborne's painful task to dance between law-and-order sentiment and the loud cursing of his border constituents. The possibilities of this rumpus grow on me, Ardmore."
"There is no rumpus, Mr. Collins," said Jerry over her shoulder. "The governor of North Carolina is merely giving expression to his civic pride and virtue."
Leaving Ardsley, they followed a dismal stretch of road until they reached the highway that connects Turner's and Kildare.
"It's going to be morning pretty soon. We must get the prisoner into Turner's by five o'clock. Trot 'em up, Paul," ordered Cooke.
They were all in capital spirits now, with a fairly good road before them, leading straight to Turner's, and with no expectation of any trouble in landing their prisoner safely in jail. A wide publication of the fact that Appleweight had been dragged from North Carolina and locked in a South Carolina jail would have the effect of clearing Governor Dangerfield's skirts of any complicity with the border outlaws, while at the same time making possible a plausible explanation by Governor Dangerfield to the men in the hills of the contemptible conduct of the governor of South Carolina in effecting the arrest of their great chief.
They were well into South Carolina territory now, and were jogging on at a sharp trot, when suddenly Cooke turned back and halted the wagon.
"There's something coming—wait!"
"Maybe Bill's friends are out looking for him," suggested Collins.
"Or it may be Grissy," cried Ardmore in sudden alarm.
"Your professor is undoubtedly asleep in his camp on the Raccoon," replied Collins contemptuously. "Do not be alarmed, Mr. Ardmore."
Cooke impatiently bade them be quiet.
"If we're accosted, what shall we say?" he asked.
"We'll say," replied Jerry instantly, "that one of the laborers at Ardsley is dead, and that we are taking his remains to his wife's family at Turner's. I shall be his grief-stricken widow."
The guards already had Appleweight down on the floor of the wagon, where one of them sat on his feet to make sure he did not create a disturbance. At her own suggestion Jerry dismounted and climbed into the wagon, where she sat on the side board, with her head deeply bowed as though in grief.
"Pretty picture of a sorrowing widow," mumbled Collins. Ardmore punched him in the ribs to make him stop laughing. To the quick step of walking horses ahead of them was now added the whisper and creak of leather.
"Hello, there!" yelled Cooke, wishing to take the initiative.
"Hey-O!" answered a voice, and all was still.
"Give us the road; we're taking a body into Turner's to catch the morning train," called Cooke.
"Who's dead?"
"One of Ardmore's Dutchmen. Shipping the corpse back to Germany."
The party ahead of them paused as though debating the case.
The north-bound party was a blur in the road. Their horses sniffed and moved restlessly about as their riders conferred.
"Give us the road!" shouted Cooke. "We haven't much time to catch our train."
"Who did you say was dead?"
"Karl Schmidt," returned Paul promptly.
Ardmore's heart sank, fearful lest an inspection of the corpse should be proposed. But at this moment a wail, eerie and heart-breaking, rose and fell dismally upon the night. It was Jerry mourning her dead husband, her slight figure swaying back and forth over his body in an abandon of grief.
"De poor vidow—she be mit us," called out big Paul, forsaking his usual excellent English for guttural dialect.
"Who are you fellows?" demanded Cooke, spurring his horse forward. The horsemen, to his surprise, seemed to draw back, and he heard a voice speak out sharply, followed by a regrouping of the riders at the side of the road.
"We been to a dance at Turner's, and air goin' back home to Kildare," came the reply.
"That seems all right," whispered Ardmore to Collins.
"Thus," muttered Collins, "in the midst of death we are in life," and this, reaching Jerry, caused her to bend over the corpse at her feet as though in a convulsive spasm of sorrow, whereupon, to add color to their story, Paul rumbled off a few consolatory sentences in German.
"Give us the road!" commanded Cooke, and without further parley they started ahead, closing about the wagon to diminish, as far as possible, the size of the caravan. Paul kept the horses at a walk, as became their sad errand, and Jerry continued to weep dolorously.
They passed the horsemen at a slight rise in the rolling road. The party bound for Turner's moved steadily forward, the horsemen huddled about the wagon, with Jerry's led horse between Ardmore and Collins at the rear. At the top of the knoll hung the returning dancers, well to the left of the road, permitting with due respect the passing of the funeral party. One of the men, Ardmore could have sworn, lifted his hat until the wagon had passed. Then some one called good night, and, looking back, Ardmore saw them—a dozen men, he judged—regain the road and quietly resume their journey toward Kildare.
"Pretty peaceable for fellows who've been attending a dance," suggested Collins, craning his neck to look after them.
Cooke turned back with the same observation, and seemed troubled.
"I was afraid to look too closely at those men. They seemed rather too sober, and I was struck with the fact that they bunched up pretty close, as though they were hiding something."
"They were afraid of the corpse," remarked Collins readily. "To meet a dead man on a lonely road at this hour of the morning is enough to sober the most riotous."
"One fellow lifted his hat as we passed, and I thought—"
"Well, what did you think, Mr. Ardmore?" demanded Cooke impatiently.
"Well, it may seem strange, but I thought there was something about that chap that suggested Grissy. It would be like Grissy to lift his hat to a corpse under any circumstances. He has spent a whole lot of time in Paris, and besides, he never forgets his manners."
"But suppose it was Griswold," said Cooke, wishing to dispose of the suspicion, "what could he be doing out here? He hasn't Appleweight—we know that; and he has just now missed his chance of ever getting him."
They paused to allow Jerry to resume her horse, and one of the detectives joined in the conference to venture his opinion that the men they had passed were in uniform. "They looked like militia to me," and as he was a careful man, Cooke took note of his remark, though he made no comment.
"Suppose they were in uniform," said Jerry lightly; "they can do no harm, and as we are now in South Carolina, and they are not our troops, it would not be proper for us to molest them. Let us go on, for Mr. Appleweight's widow is not anxious to miss her train back to the fatherland."
"If they were a detail of the enemy's militia, they would have held us up," declared Cooke with finality.
But as they moved on toward Turner's, Ardmore was still troubled over what had seemed to him the remarkable Parisian courtesy of the returning reveler who had lifted his hat as the corpse passed. Grissy, he kept saying over and over to himself, was no fool by any manner of means, and he was unable to conjecture why the associate professor of admiralty, known to be detached on special duty for the governor of South Carolina, should be riding to Kildare, unless he contemplated some coup of importance.
The stars paled under the growing light of the early summer dawn. Appleweight, with shoulders wearily drooping, contemplated the attending cortege with the gaze of one who sullenly accepts a condition he does not in the least understand.
A few early risers saw the strange company enter and proceed to the jail; but before half the community had breakfasted, Bill Appleweight, the outlaw, was securely locked in jail in Turner Court House, the seat of Mingo County, in the state of South Carolina, and the jailer, moreover, was sharing the distinguished captive's thraldom.
Collins, at the railway station, was announcing to the world the fact that at the very moment when Governor Dangerfield was about to seize Appleweight and punish him for his crimes, the outlaw had been kidnapped in North Carolina and taken under cover of night to a jail in South Carolina where Governor Osborne might be expected to shield him from serious prosecution with all the power of his high office.