The Master of Appleby | Page 7

enough to come at length to serviceable blows
under my old field-marshal on the Turkish frontier.
To you of a younger generation, born in the day of swift mail-coaches
and well-kept post-roads, the slowness with which our laggard news
traveled in that elder time must needs seem past belief. It was early in
the year '79 before I began to hear more than vague camp-fire tales of

the struggle going on between the colonies and the mother country; and
from that to setting foot once more upon the soil of my native Carolina
was still another year.
What I found upon landing at New Berne and saw while riding a
jog-trot thence to the Catawba was a province rent and torn by partizan
warfare. Though I came not once upon the partizans themselves in all
that long faring, there were trampled fields and pillaged houses enough
to serve as mile-stones; and in my native Mecklenburg a mine full
charged, with slow-match well alight for its firing.
Charleston had fallen, and Colonel Tarleton's outposts were already
widespread on the upper waters of the Broad and the Catawba. Thus it
was that the first sight which greeted my eyes when I rode into
Queensborough was the familiar trappings of my old service, and I was
made to know that in spite of Mr. Jefferson's boldly written Declaration
of Independence, and that earlier casting of the king's yoke by the
patriotic Mecklenburgers themselves, my boyhood home was for the
moment by sword-right a part of his Majesty's province of North
Carolina.
You are not to suppose that these things moved me greatly. As yet I
was chiefly concerned with my own affair and anxious to learn at first
hands the cost to me of my father's connection with the Regulators.
Touching this, I was not long kept in ignorance. Of all the vast
demesne of Appleby Hundred there was no roof to shelter the son of
the outlawed Roger Ireton save that of this poor hunting lodge in the
mighty forest of the Catawba, overlooked, with the few runaway blacks
inhabiting it, in the intaking of an estate so large that I think not even
my father knew all the metes and bounds of it.
I shall not soon forget the interview with the lawyer in which I was told
the inhospitable truth. Nor shall I forget his truculent leer when he
hinted that I had best be gone out of these parts, since it was not yet too
late to bring down the sentence of outlawry from the father to the son.
It was well for him that I knew not at the time that he was Gilbert

Stair's factor. For I was mad enough to have throttled him where he sat
at his writing table, matching his long fingers and smirking at me with
his evil smile. But of this man more in his time and place. His name
was Owen Pengarvin. I would have you remember it.
For a week and a day I lingered on at Queensborough, for what I knew
not, save that all the world seemed suddenly to have grown stale and
profitless, and my life a thing of small account. One day I would be
minded to go back to my old field-marshal and the keeping of the
Turkish border; the next I would ride over some part of my stolen
heritage and swear a great oath to bide till I should come to my own
again. And on these alternating days the storm of black rage filled my
horizons and I became a derelict to drive on any rock or shoal in this
uncharted sea of wrath.
On one of these gallops farthest afield I chanced upon the bridle-path
that led to our old hunting lodge in the forest depths. Tracing the path
to its end among the maples I found the cabin, so lightly touched by
time that the mere sight of it carried me swiftly back to those happy
days when my father and I had stalked the white-tailed deer in the hill
glades beyond, with this log-built cabin for a rest-camp. I spurred up
under the low-hanging trees. The door stood wide, and a thin wreath of
blue smoke curled upward from the mouth of the wattled chimney.
Then and there I had my first welcome home. Old black Darius--old
when I had last seen him at Appleby Hundred, and a very grandsire of
ancients now--was one of the runaways who made the forest lodge a
refuge. He had been my father's body-servant, and, notwithstanding all
the years that lay between, he knew me at once.
Thereupon, as you would guess, I came immediately into some small
portion of my kingdom. Though Darius was the patriarch, the other
blacks were also fugitives from Appleby