wish you luck, sir,” she said softly. “All the very best of luck.”
Then she was moving away, with the dust rising in little puffs about her bare feet, her hips twitching to each stride, the long yellow hair falling almost to the small of her back. Stafford stared after her, motionless, until she was gone out of sight around a bend in the road and under the sheltering branches of the towering pines.
He sighed and toed the stallion to a gallop. Eagerness beat in him with a rising pulse. Less than a dozen miles from here was Laura Lee, and home.
Ezra Whipple bent to the wash pan, sloshing cold well water onto his bruised face. Fire ate in him, a roaring flame of hate and frustration that called on his pride for vengeance. No man ever before had stood to the thud of his meaty fists. He had fought fair and foul more times than he could remember, with all manner of men. Once his thumbs had gouged the eyes from a Pennsylvania farmer. Once his teeth had chewed off the ear of a New York merchant in a Fly Market tavern.
He did not like the taste of his bruises. He toweled his face gently, aware that Ben Leap watched from the planked bar, a long-barreled horse pistol primed and cocked in his hand. The old man had taken the pistol from an upper room, from a room that belonged to the man who had beaten him so savagely.
“A good man, that one,” he said grudgingly to Ben Leap, pretending affability. “At another time, I might have been his friend.”
Ben Leap spat across the bar. “No friend of yours, you scum. He’s a plantation man, a gentleman. The Staffords have been here in Virginia for near a century.”
“Still and all, he’s a man. A good man with his fists. He never let me get close enough to hug him once. If he had, I could have snapped the ribs of him like dry sticks. A good man.”
“They come no better.”
Whipple chuckled, and held his shirt aloft. “Tore it to tatters with his knuckles. Now where’ll I get me another?”
Ben Leap eyed the big man curiously. He was an ordinary keeper, and his trade was buying and selling. He said slowly, “I could sell you one, for a shilling and tuppence.”
The big man put a hand in his breeches pocket and brought out some coins. Placing them carefully on a table-top, he backed toward the stair. “Fetch me one. There’s your money. I’ll stay near the stair, to prove I mean you no harm.”
Ben Leap reflected. The grip of the pistol in his hand was reassuring. “I’ll fetch one from the storeroom. No tricks, mind. I’d as leave shoot as not. I may be old, but I can use a firearm still.”
Whipple laughed. “No tricks.”
When the old man was gone, Whipple whirled and went up the stairs, three treads at a time. Impatiently he hunted, opening bedroom doors until he came to the room with the slanting ceiling and the dusty furniture. With the instincts of the burglar he once had been, in New York town before the war, he knew this for the room he sought.
On silent feet he went to the mahogany dresser, opening and closing drawers and finding them empty. He turned to the writing table, but abandoned that after a glance. His eyes touched the ironbound chest, slid away from it, and then returned.
He knelt. The lock was open. As his hands pushed up the chest top, he gasped. A hunting shirt and leggings, a carved powder horn marked with the Stafford name, a green sash and moccasins lay piled before him.
Wonderingly he lifted out the white buckskin hunting shirt. “One of Morgan’s men! Ah, now why should he be so sly about the fact, unless he wants to keep it secret?”
Ezra Whipple knew the South was torn apart by strife between Tory and rebel. Fathers fought sons and daughters fought mothers. It might be that Colonel Billy Joe Stafford—the fringes on the hunting shirt told Whipple his rank—would be hurt by having his secret exposed.
The big man rolled the powder horn under the hunting shirt and tied them both with the green sash. His loose mouth twitched in a grin. Moving to the window, he tossed his little package out onto the grass of the side yard. He would cozen Ben Leap into telling him where the Stafford plantation was located. After that, he’d trust his ears and his tongue and his nimble wits to turn this secret to his advantage.
His fingertips touched the swollen bruises on jaw and cheeks. Billy Joe Stafford would pay for the beating he had given Ezra Whipple, in the way that would hurt him most.
Chapter Two
THE SIX white pillars of the Hall beckoned Stafford from three miles away. The rows of tall, shutter-hung windows, dimly seen in the shadows of the columned portico, were shy eyes peering out as if in disbelief at the sight of the master riding home at last. Sunlight glinted on the gambrel roof with its three great red-brick chimneys. Fresh paint gave the building an elegance that touched something deep inside him.
He let the stallion run along the graveled drive that curved by the outbuildings and the long white stables with their sweep of cypress shingles neat and spotless. Reining in with a scrape of gravel scratching sparks under iron horseshoes, he came out of the saddle with a call for the stables.
A black face framed in white hair was thrust above the half door of a stall. The eyes opened very wide and the mouth fell open. For a long instant Old Gem stared. Then his shaking hand was pushing aside the lower part of the door, and he was running forward, weeping in his delight.
“Master Billy! Master Billy!”
Stafford opened his arms wide and pulled the old slave into his hug. Then with his hands on the bowed shoulders he pushed the old man back and ran his eyes over him. “You look well fed, Gem! Something tells me that we aren’t exactly starving at Stafford Hall these days.”
A curious look touched the old slave’s features. His eyes dropped as he said, “We eat good, Master Billy. We work hard, too. The mistress stands for no nonsense, ’cepting from—”
He broke off and fear showed in his old eyes. For a moment he hesitated, then straightened his shoulders. Old Gem knew what an angry master could do to a slave, but he was an old man, soon to die anyhow. For sixty years he had lived within sight of the Dan. He had seen the Hall grow from a little cabin to its present elegance. His hands had taught two generations of Staffords how to ride a horse. Besides, this young giant before him loved him like a son his father.
“They’s British officers always at the house, Master Billy. They bring gold for the wheat and vegetables we grow. The mistress has made you rich.”
“On British gold,” said Stafford, and he frowned.
Old Gem licked his lips. He said with a strange inflection in his voice, “One gennelman in particular. He’s ’most always here. Right now, even.”
He winced as powerful fingers dug deep into his arm. A hellish light began to glow in his master’s eyes, a light that flared once and then died out to a still more frightening blankness.
Then Stafford was whirling and moving away, tall and powerful and somehow magnificent to the old slave, even in the old blue velvet frock coat and breeches that were too tight for him. Old Gem reached for the reins of the big stallion. His hard hands patted the sleek nose gently, but his eyes watched his master mount the stone steps of the portico and disappear between two tall white pillars.
“Never
