"You need not make the danger an excuse. I will be still; and when I speak to you again, you will be willing enough to hear me, I promise you!" "Nay, then, dear lady; you must not take it so!" I protested. "'Tis my misfortune to be ever blundering." But to this she gave me no answer at all; and barring a word or two of heartening for her serving woman, she never opened her lips again throughout the passage perilous. By good hap we came to the crossing of the cavern stream without meeting any foeman; and on the farther side of the shallow ford we found the old borderer awaiting us. "Ez I allow, we've smelt the bait in the trap and come off with whole bones, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego," he said, mixing metaphor, Scripture phrase and frontier idiom as was his wont. Then he put a leg over his horse and gave the stirrup-word: "From now on, old Jehu, the son o' Nimshi, is the hoss-whipper we've got to beat. Get ye behind, Cap'n John, and give the hoss that lags a half inch 'r so of your sword-p'int." Then and there began a night flight long to be remembered. Down the valley of the swift river to the ford where Yeates and I had crossed after the mock rescue of Margery the night before, we let the horses pick the way as they could. But once beyond the ford, where the trace was wider and the footing less precarious, we plied whip and spur, pushing the saddle-beasts for every stride we could get out of them in the blind race. I have marveled often that we came not once to grief in all this long night-gallop through the darkness. There was every chance for it. The over-arching trees of the great forest shut out all the starlight, and the trace was no more than a bridle-path, rougher than any cart road. Yet we held the breakneck pace steadily, save for the time it took to thread some steep defile to a stream crossing, or to scramble up its fellow on the opposite side; and when the dawn began to gray in the sky ahead, we were well out of the broken mountain region and into the opener forest of the hill country. The sun was yet below the eastern horizon when we came to the fording of a larger stream than any we had crossed in the night. Its course was toward the sunrise, hence I took it for some tributary of the Catawba or the Broad. "'Tis the Broad itself," said Ephraim Yeates, in answer to my asking; "and yit it ain't; leastwise, it ain't the one you know. 'Tis the one the Parley-voos claimed in the old war, and they call it the Frinch Broad." "But that flows north and westward, if I remember aright," said I. "So it do, so it do--in gineral. But hereabouts 'twill run all ways for Sunday, by spells." "If this be the French Broad we are not yet out of the Tuckasege country, as I take it." "Mighty nigh to it; nigh enough to make camp for a resting spell. I reckon ye're a-needing that same pretty toler'ble bad, ain't ye, little gal?" this last to Margery.