Jack set his teeth. “I’ll go if there are seven thousand devils from h—l there,” he gritted.
“Same thing!” assented Rogers, cheerfully. “All right! If you feel that way about it, I reckon I’ll have to go along. But there ain’t no use of being any crazier than we got to be. If we start at dark we’ll git there just about the best time.”
CHAPTER XXI
DUSK was falling fast when the three friends, with ringing skates, fast bound, sped forth on their perilous errand. Before them stretched the vast expanse of the lake, steel-clad, reflecting and multiplying every spark of light that lingered in the firmament. Behind them, low down in the west, the pale ghost of the half-moon dipped swiftly toward the tinted clouds into which the sun had so recently plunged. All about hung a silvery haze, moonlight-born, an exhalation from the blue-black ice to the blue-black sky. Far in the north the nascent lights of an aurora flickered against the sky.
The three did not speak much. The wind that had swept the ice clear of snow made speech difficult, cutting the breath from their nostrils and whirling it away in transient wreaths of mist. Leaning forward, to shield their faces, the three pushed their mouths into the furs that circled their throats and drove doggedly forward into the northeast.
Jack, at least, was silent for other reasons. He was going to the place where Alagwa had lived. But would he find her there? Or would he find her gone—gone with the fleeing British and Indians?
He had reason to think that they had fled. Every soldier in the camp on the River Raisin was certain that they had. General Winchester, of whom he had sought permission to go beyond the lines, seemed sure of it.
Jack had found the general comfortably lodged a quarter of a mile from his troops, in the house of Francis Navarre, a resident of the place and a man with cultivated tastes and a well-stocked cellar. When Jack called, the general was at table with half a dozen other genial Frenchmen, who were laughing at his jests and listening to his stories with apparently absorbing interest. A politician before he had been a soldier, habituated to an easy, luxurious life from which he had been for many weeks cut off and subjected to privation and suffering, the general was expanding like a flower in the sunshine of his companions’ flatteries.
He received Jack affably—affability was his forte—and listened to his story with interest.
“Certainly you may cross the lines, my dear sir,” he said, when Jack had made his request. “But I am afraid you won’t find your wife at Amherstburg. My good friend, Jaques La Salle here”—he nodded toward a smiling Frenchman across the table—“my good friend, Jaques La Salle, has information that Fort Malden has been destroyed and that the British and the Indians have all fled. In a day or two I expect to march up and take possession. A glass of wine with you, sir.”