Not until they were over the mountain, was there any opportunity of discussing the strange warning they had received.
"Can it be that old man has been our guardian angel all the time?" asked Lawrence.
"Impossible," said Dan. "We received the first warning when we had hardly left the valley of La Belle. We have come fast. How could that old man have come over the mountains and got ahead of us?"
"And where did he go when he disappeared so suddenly?" asked one.
"And who shot the guerrilla?" questioned another.
"It's a secret only the mountains can tell. I have heard they were haunted," said Dan.
"It's God's hand," said one of the men, a solemn, clerical-looking fellow, whom the men called Preacher. Before he was a soldier, he had been a Methodist class leader; and there was not a braver man in the company.
Argue as they might, they could come to no conclusion. To them it was a mystery that was never solved.
It was weeks before Lawrence fully knew of the danger from which the old man had saved him. Captain Turner, in his swift ride to get ahead of him, had fallen in with a scouting party of fifty Confederate cavalry; not only this, but his force had been augmented by guerrillas until he had fully two hundred men, well armed and mounted. Had Lawrence met this force in the narrow valley, he could not have escaped defeat.
The horror and amazement of the advance guard of Turner's force may be imagined when they came upon the scene of conflict. That the battle had just been fought, was evident; the smoke of the conflict had not entirely cleared from the field. What was more surprising, not an armed man was in sight—neither Federal nor Confederate.