“If you think it wisest, as it may be, I will try, and be there within an hour, if not detained. If I am, do not desert me, Bart, but return to this kitchen at dusk.”
“Agreed! But you'll go it without the ifs, I reckon,” said Bart, swinging his panniers to his shoulder, and departing with full confidence in his ability to effect an escape perilous to them both, but made much more so to him by the new charge to had so cheerfully undertaken.
CHAPTER X.
“But a gloom fell o'er their way,
A fearful wall went ey'”
Fortunately for Miss Haviland, all those who had been enlisted to act as spies upon her movements happened, that afternoon, to be absent, or busily engaged in a quarter of the encampment from which all view of her proposed path of escape was intercepted by intervening buildings. Much to her relief, therefore, on setting out on her perilous journey, she was permitted to pass forward through the street unquestioned, and without exciting any particular observation. And when she arrived at the outpost, the soldier on duty, with a bare glance at her offered pass, respectfully motioned her to proceed on her way. A short walk then brought her to the house to which she had been directed; and here, finding every thing in readiness, she immediately mounted the now strangely-improved pony, and, with her trusty attendant on foot, set forward, at a quick pace, in the main road leading from the lake to Fort Edward. Their way was now mostly through a deep forest, and over a road which every where exhibited evidence with what perseverance and skill the Americans had labored to destroy and block it up, and with what incredible exertions it had been reopened by their opponents, wholly untaught in the easiest modes of accomplishing the Herculean task. In some places, long causeys over miry morasses had been entirely torn up, and every log of which they were composed drawn off beyond the means of recovery; and, in others, streams had been dammed up, causing extensive overflows, or turned from their natural channels, and thus made to wash out impassable gulfs. Every bridge had disappeared, and all the surrounding timber rendered useless for constructing more; while, for mile after mile, one continued mass of gnarled and crooked trees, here pitched together in seemingly inextricable tangles, and there piled mountains high, had been felled into the road, which even now had scarcely been made passable by the toiling thousands who, for weeks, had been employed upon it. In consequence of this, and the time spent in making circuits round in the woods to avoid parties of the enemy, who were seasonably discovered by the wary guide to be still at work, in several places, in trying to improve some of the worst portions of the road, the progress of our heroine was slow and obscure. And it was not till after a dreary and fatiguing ride of several hours, that she and her attendant began to emerge into the more open country bordering the Hudson.
“Now, miss,” said Bart, falling in by the side of the maiden, and speaking in a low, cautionary tone—“now we are coming out on to the river, and at a spot that I feel kinder shyish of.”
“On what account, Bart?” asked the other, with a glance of concern.
“Well, it's for a reason I have, and then one or two more on top of that,” replied the former, with his usual indirectness. “In the first place, it is a sort of a torified neighborhood about there which may hold those more likely to mistrust and snap us up than the regular-built enemy, who may, some of 'em, be there too, likely; as a regiment, or so, have already gone on, by this same road, to Fort Edward, which is not a great ways beyond.”