L RICHARD COVERDALE'S DEBT WAS PAID 549

LI THE GOOD CAUSE GAINS A CONVERT 562

LII BRINGS US TO THE JOURNEY'S END 573







CHAPTER I

IN WHICH I WHET MY FATHER'S SWORD


The summer day was all but spent when Richard Jennifer, riding express,
brought me Captain Falconnet's challenge.

'Twas a dayfall to be marked with a white stone, even in our Carolina
calendar. The sun, reaching down to the mountain-girt horizon in the
west, filled all the upper air with the glory of its departing, and the
higher leaf plumes of the great maples before my cabin door wrought
lustrous patterns in gilded green upon a zenith background of turquoise
shot with crimson, like the figurings of some rich old tapestries I had
once seen in my field-marshal's castle in the Mark of Moravia.

Beyond the maples a brook tinkled and plashed over the stones on its way
to the near-by Catawba; and its peaceful brawling, and the evensong of a