Indeed,
if Norah Shaughnessy were not there to prompt--to prop--his memory,
Graham thought it like enough that even now the soldier would have
wavered. But never a jot or tittle had Mullins been shaken from the
original statement.
"There was two women," he said, "wid their shawls over their heads,"
and those two, refusing to halt at his demand, had been overtaken and
one of them seized, to his bitter cost, for the other had driven a
keen-bladed knife through his ribs, even as he sought to examine his
captive. "They wouldn't spake," said he, "so what could I do but pull
the shawl from the face of her to see could she be recognized?" Then
came the fierce, cat-like spring of the taller of the two. Then the
well-nigh fatal thrust. What afterwards became of the women he could
say no more than the dead. Norah might rave about its being the
Frenchwoman that did it to protect the major's lady--this he spoke in
whispered confidence and only in reply to direct question--but it
wouldn't be for the likes of him to preshume. Mullins, it seems, was a
soldier of the old school.
Then came fresh and dire anxiety at Sandy. Four days after Blakely's
start there appeared two swarthy runners from the way of Beaver Creek.
They bore a missive scrawled on the paper lining of a cracker box, and
it read about as follows:
CAMP IN SUNSET PASS, November 3d.
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