THE BATTALION.
9
troops. These men were dangerous. There were Indians
in the swamps, who had been allies of Rawdon and Balfour,
and who had cause to dread the vengeance of those who had
served under Marion. There were run away negroes, who
had not succeeded in getting across the Florida line, but were
living by marauding wherever they could. There were
stragglers from both armies, who had reason to fear contact
with authority of any kind and knew themselves guilty of
robberies that would be speedily and ruthlessly punished,
were they once in the power of those whom they had wronged.
The roads were therefore unsafe for single passengers, and it
was customary for those who had to travel to go well armed
and in company with men whom they could trust.
Yet at this hour of sunset on the lovel}’ day you have been
called to note, there rode a solitary traveler toward the great
inn at Rantowles. He had expected to reach Charleston that
night. But the roads were very bad from the recent tran
sport of heavy canon and of trains of baggage wagons and the
tramp of horse and foot for many months over them; and the
good horse, stout gray of Norman blood though he was, had
been so often mired in the deep places that it was plain he
could not carry his rider much farther.
Yet the rider was loth to stop at the Rantowles inn, for the
place had an evil name. He knew little of this part of the
sountry, having come up to Savannah from the old Highlan
der settlement of Darien; but at the inn by the Edisto ferry
where he had stopped an hour for a noonday snack and to
give his horse a bait, the hostler had whispered him to have
a care how he spent the night at Rontowles. On his pressing
the man to be more explicit, he could get nothing more from
him than the vague statement that solitary travelers were
never seen again, who had put up at that hostelry. He had
laughed to himself as he rode on, saying inwardly that this
was nothing but the rivalry between two inns on the same
highway. Yet the hint had gone deep, and he caught him
self looking to the priming of his pistols and feeling his
sword to see that it would slip easily from Its sheath. As he