The clouds were breaking, and a faint blue light seeped through the rifts. It was as though the trees and bushes had grown magically from the blackness, only to dissolve in blackness again as the rifts closed. For a moment he paused, thinking that he had heard the sound of voices. Ten minutes passed while he crouched in the mud, listening. There was another brief instant of moonlight, this time brighter, and the shadows cast by the trees seemed living, moving things. Tom could feel his heart thumping.
"Don't get excited," he muttered to himself. It was encouraging and comforting to hear the sound of his own voice: "Don't be a fool and lose your wits—and spoil your chances."
To his left was a forest, and directly ahead of him ran a long row of bushes. He wanted to avoid the forest, so he hurried as fast as he could across the field during the next interval of darkness. Then came another wait of five minutes, and another dash forward. He gained the bushes and discovered that he had come to a road. It bordered the river, he decided, for now the rush of the water seemed directly before him. Just as he was about to cross the road, he caught the beat of a horse's hoofs upon the mud. A minute later the horse galloped past; Tom had a brief glimpse of the rider, with his rifle held in the crook of his arm.
Tom crossed the road and entered the thicket on the other side. Now the river sounded below him, and he decided that he must be close to the edge of an embankment. He crept forward slowly on his hands and knees through the tangle of branches, feeling the ground before him. One hand went off into space, and he groped about. Then he drew back and waited for another moment of moonlight to show him his position. When it came, a few minutes later, he saw the Tennessee, swollen and tossing, forty feet below him. He was on the edge of a sheer embankment.
"Can't do it here," he said, moving away. He crawled back to the road, crossed it, and walked in the direction of Chattanooga. Presently he heard someone yelling in the distance. He decided that it was the horseman calling a farmer from his bed and warning him of the escaped Yankee.
After a half-hour of slow traveling, he made his way towards the river again. Now the dawn was coming, and the water rippled luminously as Tom looked over the embankment. At this point, the descent to the water's edge was more gradual—a straight drop of twelve feet, then a slope of gravel. Once down there, he would have no choice but to swim the river, and swimming in such a current was no easy matter. Would it be better, he asked himself, to go farther down, to risk another half-hour in exploring!
His thoughts were interrupted suddenly by voices on the road, twenty yards behind him. A man said: "Reckon this is as good a spot as any. Out there I can see as far up as Johnson's and a mile down."
"Suit yourself," answered the other; "you know the country. I'll go down an' get Phipps out if nobody else has. Then I'll be back along up this way and tell the boys that you're here."
"You say this Yank's a young man?"
"'Bout twenty, I'd say."