"No," said Ardmore, taking it from him, "it's a kimona of the most expensive silk, which the colonel undoubtedly wears when they get him up at midnight to hear the reports of his scouts."
They went down the road, stumbling now and then over a bit of debris from the vanished wagon.
"It's like walking on carpet," observed Cooke, picking up a feathered chapeau. "I didn't know there were so many clothes in all the world."
They abandoned the idea of farther pursuit on reaching a trunk standing on end, from which a uniform dress-coat drooped sadly.
"This is not our trouble; it's his trouble. I guess he's struck a smoother road down there. We'd better go back," said Cooke.
"Whom the gods would destroy they first dress in glad rags," piped Collins.
They sat down and laughed until the negro approached warily with the horses.
"He's lost his raiment, but saved his life," sputtered Collins, climbing into his saddle.
"He's lost more than that," remarked Ardmore, and his flushed countenance, noted by the others as he lighted a cigarette, was cheerfuller than they had ever seen it before.
In a moment they had climbed the hill and were in hot pursuit of the adjutant-general's abandoned army.
Thus Mr. Thomas Ardmore tested his pickets with a shibboleth of his own devising. The sturdy militiamen of North Carolina patrolled the northern bank of Raccoon Creek at midnight, aware that that riotous flood alone separated them from their foes. The terraces at Ardsley bristled with the guns of the First Light Battery, while, upon a cot in the wine cellar beneath, Mr. Bill Appleweight, _alias_ Poteet, slept the sleep of the just.
He was rudely aroused, however, at one o'clock in the morning by Ardmore, Cooke and Collins, and taken out through the kitchen to one of the Ardsley farm wagons. Big Paul held the reins, and four of Cooke's detectives were mounted as escort. Ardmore, Cooke and Collins were to accompany the party as a board of strategy in the movement upon Turner Court House, South Carolina.
Appleweight, the terror of the border, blinked at the lanterns that flashed about him in the courtyard. He had been numbed by his imprisonment, and even now he yielded himself docilely to the inevitable. His capture in the first instance at Mount Nebo had been clear enough, and he could have placed his hand on the men who did it if he had been free for a couple of hours. This he had pondered over his solacing solitaire as he sat on the case of Chateau Bizet in the Ardsley wine cellar; but the subsequent events had been altogether too much for him. He had been taken from his original captors by a girl, and while the ignominy of this was not lost on the outlaw, his wits had been unequal to the further fact, which he had no ground for disbelieving, that this captivity within the walls of Ardsley had been due to a daughter of that very governor of North Carolina whom he had counted his friend. Why the girl had interested herself in his seizure and incarceration; why he had been carried to the great house of a New York gentleman whom he had never harmed in the least; and why, more than all, he should have been locked in a room filled with bottles bearing absurd and unintelligible titles, and containing, he had learned by much despairing experiment, liquids that singularly failed to satisfy thirst--these were questions before which Appleweight, _alias_ Poteet, bowed his head helplessly.