"If they were a detail of the enemy's militia, they would have held us up," declared Cooke with finality.
But as they moved on toward Turner's, Ardmore was still troubled over what had seemed to him the remarkable Parisian courtesy of the returning reveler who had lifted his hat as the corpse passed. Grissy, he kept saying over and over to himself, was no fool by any manner of means, and he was unable to conjecture why the associate professor of admiralty, known to be detached on special duty for the governor of South Carolina, should be riding to Kildare, unless he contemplated some _coup_ of importance.
The stars paled under the growing light of the early summer dawn. Appleweight, with shoulders wearily drooping, contemplated the attending cortege with the gaze of one who sullenly accepts a condition he does not in the least understand.
A few early risers saw the strange company enter and proceed to the jail; but before half the community had breakfasted, Bill Appleweight, the outlaw, was securely locked in jail in Turner Court House, the seat of Mingo County, in the state of South Carolina, and the jailer, moreover, was sharing the distinguished captive's thraldom.
Collins, at the railway station, was announcing to the world the fact that at the very moment when Governor Dangerfield was about to seize Appleweight and punish him for his crimes, the outlaw had been kidnapped in North Carolina and taken under cover of night to a jail in South Carolina where Governor Osborne might be expected to shield him from serious prosecution with all the power of his high office.
Mrs. Atchison met the returning adventurers at the door.
"Your conduct, Jerry Dangerfield, is beyond words!" she exclaimed, seizing the girl's hands. "And so you really locked that horrid person in a real jail! Well, we shan't miss him! We have been kept up all night by the arrival here of other prisoners--brought in like parcels from the grocer's."
"Dragged here at an unearthly hour of the morning, and flung into the most impossible places by your soldiers! You can hear them yelling without much trouble from the drawing-room, and we had to give up breakfast because the racket they are making was so annoying."