"Another time, Richard. I am strangely unnerved and dizzy-headed now. By
and by, when I am stronger, I will tell you all."
Taking a reproach where none was meant, he sprang up with a self-aimed
malison upon his lack of care for me, stirred the fire alive and brewed
me a most delicious-smelling cup of broth. And afterward, when I had
drunk the broth with some small beckonings of returning appetite, he
spread his coat to screen me from the fire light and would have driven
me to sleep again.
"At any rate, you shall not talk," he promised. "If you are wakeful I
will talk to you and tell you what little I have gleaned about the
fighting."
His news was chiefly a later repetition of Father Matthieu's and Captain
Abram Forney's, but there was this to add: the Congress had appointed
the Englishman, Horatio Gates, chief of the army in the South, and this
new leader was on his way to take command.
De Kalb, with the Maryland and Delaware lines and Colonel Armand's
legion, was encamped on Deep River, waiting for the newly-appointed
general; and Caswell and Griffith Rutherford, with the militia, were
already pressing forward to some handgrips with my Lord Cornwallis in
the South.
Nearer at hand, the partizan war-fire flamed afresh wherever a Tory
company met a patriot, and there were wicked doings, more like savage
massacres than fair-fought battles of the soldier sort.
When he had made an end of his small war budget, I set him on to tell me
how he came to be at hand to help me so in the nick of time on the night
of the cabin sack.
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