Dick swore fervently and put his face to the foe and his back to a tree. Whereupon I dragged him down as promptly as he had just now dragged me up, telling him his broadsword would make but a poor shift parrying musket-balls. What followed after was over and done with in a dozen fluttering heart-beats. Seeing the case was desperate, General Davidson gathered Graham's fifty into his flying column, flogged his rear into the retreat, and was pitched out of his saddle by a Tory rifle-bullet whilst he was doing it. And when the way to our horses was clear of the galloping Carolinians, and we would have run to mount and ride after them, the swarming redcoat van was upon us. "Up with you and out of this!" cried Jennifer, setting me the example. "We must e'en gallop as we can. Quick, man!" But in the gathering and the retreat our old sharpshooter under his holly bush had been left behind; and now we heard him again, chanting his terrible imprecations on the enemy. Dick saw the meaning in my look, and together we pounced to drag the old man out of hiding. When we burst down upon him, Yeates had his piece to his face and was drawing a bead on a stout man in cocked hat and plain regimentals whose horse was curveting and sidling in the nearer shallows; no less a figure, in truth, than my Lord Cornwallis himself, cheering his men on to the attack. We had scarce made out the old hunter's target when the rifle spat fire, the curveting charger reared in its death plunge, and the British commander-in-chief, unhurt, as it seemed, was dragged from the entanglement of his stirrups by his aides. The old marksman sprang up in a fury of wrath. "Dad blast ye for a pair of aim-sp'ilin'--" A roar of musketry cut the rebuke in half, and a storm of bullets smote through the branches overhead. A falling bough knocked my hat off, and I stooped to recover it. When I rose, Dick was clipping the old man tightly in his arms. Yeates's belt was cut, and a little oozing well-spring of red was slowly soaking the fringe of his hunting-shirt. "Ease me down, Cap'n Dick; ease me down. The old man's done for, this time, ez I allow--spang in the innards. Ease me down and get off for yerselves, if so be ye can, im--me--jit--" The wagging jaw dropped and the keen old eyes went dim and sightless. Dick's oath was more a sob than an imprecation; and now it was I who said: "Come on--the living before the dead!" and so we made the well-nigh hopeless dash for the horses.