owing in my heart for you since that
night upon the ship," he said to me in a great tenderness as he raised
my hand and bent to kiss it just as entered the great Gouverneur
Faulkner and the wild Jim.

I had not the courage to gaze upon the face of my Gouverneur Faulkner,
but I felt its coldness strike into my body and turn it to hardness.

For a second I stood as a stone, then a sudden resolve rose in me and
again that daredevil seized upon my thought. I took a piece of that
white paper with caution and also a pencil, and with them slipped from
the room, while that wild Jim seated himself upon my lowly stool
beside the table at which again the two great men were writing.

And out in the soft light that was now slowly fading from the side of
the mountain because of the retirement of the sun, I sat me down upon
the step of the hut and wrote to my Gouverneur Faulkner this small
letter:

"Honored Excellency, the Gouverneur Faulkner, of the State of
Harpeth:

"I go from you into the trenches of France. If your humble boy
Robert has done for you any small service, I beg of you in
that name that my Uncle, the General Robert, and my friends
never know of my dishonor of lies about my woman's estate, but
believe me to die as a soldier for France as will be the case.
Make all clear for me to my Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles.
It is that all women are not lies.
Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye."

Then I left that letter upon the doorstep, held in place by the weight
of a stone, and very softly slipped out into the shadows of the
twilight and down the mountain by the path up which that morning I had
come with my beloved Gouverneur Faulkner, then my friend. I felt a
certainty that as many as two hours would those men continue in a
consulting with that wild Jim and in that time by going fleetingly I
could gain the place where were tethered the horses, before a complete
darkness had come. From my honored father I had learned the ways of
woods in hunting and also I knew that the good Lightfoot would in
darkness carry me in safety to his stall in the barn of Mr. Bud Bell,
beside which stood my Cherry. From there I could gain the city of
Hayesville in the dead hours of the night and in those same dead hours
depart to France, after obtaining the money I had left in my desk and
which I had earned by my labors and would not be in the act of
stealing from the State of Harpeth. Only one