The next day Butler was brought to his new prison, seeming very feeble, and scarcely strong enough to walk to the chamber, far up in the peaked roof, which had been assigned for his safe keeping. The soldier observed that he looked earnestly at the new maid-servant in passing upstairs, and that a smile quivered on his lip when he saw her. But this was not strange; older eyes than his might have kindled at the sight of that beautiful face; it almost made a fool of the tenderhearted soldier himself.
After the prisoner had been installed in his chamber, the new servant would linger there a little, after serving his meals, and once the sentinel fancied that he saw the two whispering together as she sat down the dishes; but when the rustic beauty came out she was sure to drive all suspicion from his head with an arch smile that intoxicated him more deliciously than the best corn whisky he ever drank.
On the third day what little heart the poor fellow had left after his first interview was completely gone; and when she came up at nine o’clock, and asked him, with a charming smile, to step down into the kitchen and taste a mug of hot punch with lemon in it, which she had just been brewing, it required all his patriotism to refuse; and he apologized for doing his duty, with humility, as if it had been a sin.
The new servant pouted at first, but took better thought and suffered herself to be appeased; so, as a pledge of perfect reconciliation, after the little quarrel, she proposed to run to the kitchen and bring the jug of punch up to his post, where he might drink and smoke at his leisure, while she filled the glass.
This was a charming arrangement, and the sentinel enjoyed it amazingly; he drank of the punch, and tried the Dutchman’s best pipe, which the maid brought surreptitiously from the parlor, after the master had retired to bed. Thus he drank and smoked till everything became foggy around him, and he seemed to be encompassed by half a dozen pretty girls, all serving out punch for him, to say nothing of any number of grotesque pipes that danced under his nose, and a whole stock of muskets that crowded round his own trusty shooting-iron, which rested against the door.
After this singular phenomenon, the trusty sentinel kept his post with great pertinacity—but he was sound asleep, and breathing like an engine under a double head of steam.
Then the chamber-door was softly unlocked, and the pretty maid-servant gave a signal to some one within. Directly Butler appeared, ready dressed, and, treading softly over the sentinel, followed his Indian wife down stairs, out of the house, and along the narrow streets of Albany.
A quick walk to the outskirts of the town, a low whistle, and out from a piece of woods came half a dozen mounted savages, leading two horses, forest bred, and swift as deer.
Tahmeroo leaped upon one, Butler mounted the other, and away for the Valley of Wyoming, where Butler knew that his father would soon meet him with an avenging army.