I had borne up pretty well so far. Pride and the habit of a soldier’s life had supported me under this man’s scrutiny. I had told myself that it was the chance of war; that I was fortunate in being alive where so many—alas, so many!—who had sat at table with me a few hours before, had fallen. But, little by little, pain had sapped my fortitude. Every second in the saddle was a second of agony; every moment that my arm hung from the shoulder was a grinding pang. And on the threshold of this house, at the sound of the women’s voices, I had thought that at last the worst was over. Here I had promised myself relief, rest, an end. The disappointment was the sharper. The refusal to take me in seemed to be fiendish, heartless, cruel. At the mere thought of it, of the barbarity of it, self-pity choked me, and I could have shed tears. “Let me be,” I muttered. “I can bear no more.” “No, I’m d—d if I do,” Wilmer answered angrily. “I had a reason for not taking you to my place, Major, but needs must when the devil drives, and it’s there you are bound to go. We must make the best of it.” He took my rein. “It’s a long way to Salem,” he continued, “but it’s the last mile. Hold up! man, and maybe you’ll see King George yet. He certainly ought to be obliged to you,” he added with a dry laugh. He kicked up his horse. I moved away with him, biting off the prayer that rose to my lips that he would let me be. I had no other thought now but to persist, to bear, to keep the saddle; and the croak of the frogs, the plaintive notes of the mocking bird in the thicket, the change from clearing to forest and again from forest to open fields—the open fields of a considerable plantation—all passed as the scenes pass in a nightmare; now whelming me in despair, as the blackness of the trees closed about us, now lifting me to hope as lights broke out, twinkling before us. Poor Ferguson, the fight, Simms, my fall, all receded to an infinite distance; and only one thing, only one thought, one aspiration remained—the craving to rest, to lie down, to come to the end of pain. My shoulder was on fire; my arm was red-hot iron. One moment I burned with fever; the next I turned cold and faint and sick. Only a mile! But from Newgate to Tyburn is only a mile, yet how much lies between them for the wretch condemned to suffer on the gallows.