or died. What he had seen in that big bed as he came through the window, the contorted positions of Laura Lee and the British colonel, had put a disease in his brain.
He wanted to die, hanging here, with a branch under a leg and bark cutting into his palms. What reason had he to fight for life? What did life hold out to him now? His former love for Laura Lee, which was all that had been left to him after the earlier happenings of the night, was a bitter taste in his mouth. Let her have her British colonel, if she wanted him so badly! By dying here, he could give her that much.
The thought of the Colonel did what nothing else could do. It turned the bitterness in him to anger, and the anger into a need for vengeance. Live! his mind cried out to him. Live so that you can make them pay for this moment! As another musket ball grazed his cheek, he swung down and to the far side of the great tree bole. Feet feeling for branch crotches, he went down. Ten feet from the ground, he jumped.
The gelding sidled nervously as he came at him. Scorning the stirrups, he went up over his rump in a hand-propelled leap. As his weight settled hard in the saddle, the big black lunged forward into full gallop. For the second time that night, Billy Joe Stafford rode away from his family home with death only half a step behind him, with musket balls whistling in the air and a curious deadness settling in his middle.
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