the early August dawn was graying mistily overhead, but in the house the
sputtering tallow dip still struggled feebly with the gloom. They stood
facing each other, these two, my handsome lad, the pick and choice of a
comely race, looking, for all his toils and vigils, fresh and fit; and
the old man in his woolen dressing-gown, his wig awry, and his lean face
yellow in the candle-light.

"How is that you say, Mr. Stair?" says Dick. "The king--but that is only
the old Tory cry. There will never be a king again this side of the
water."

The old man reached out and hooked a lean finger in the lad's
buttonhole. "Say you so, Richard Jennifer? Then you will never have
heard the glorious news?" This with a leer that might have been of
triumph or the mere whetting of gossip eagerness--I could not tell.

"No," says Richard, with much indifference.

"Hear it, then. 'Twas at Camden, four days since. They came together in
the murk of the Wednesday morning, my Lord Cornwallis and that poor fool
Gates. De Kalb is dead; your blethering Irishman, Rutherford, is
captured; and your rag-tag rebel army is scattered to the four winds.
And that's not all. On the Friday, Colonel Tarleton came up with Sumter
at Fishing Creek and caught him napping. Whereupon, Charlie McDowell and
the over-mountain men, seeing all was lost, broke their camp on the
Broad and took to their heels, every man jack of them for himself. So ye
see, Dickie Jennifer, there's never a cursed corporal's guard left in
either Carolina to stand in the king's way."

He rattled all this off glibly, like a child repeating some lesson got