“And so they will be, but you should deliver your message to the Governor. That is of first importance. Will the ice bear us?”
“We can try. Follow us, Hunter. If it bears us it will bear you.”
They shouldered their stiff packs again, and rifles in hand went hopping swiftly but gingerly from stationary floe to stationary floe; and sprang to snowy land.
Thus ended the dreadful night.
The morning was steely cold, as yet. Once safe from pursuit, in the forest of this the east side of the Allegheny they stopped and made another fire, and ate, and each slept an hour while the two others fed the fire.
Now it was queer how comfortable and happy they felt, although it still was one hundred and forty miles to Will’s Creek, and one hundred more to the place Washington called “home.” But they had conquered.
Robert the Hunter decided that Indians, even Scarouady and Tanacharison, would not have tried to cross that river. They would have waited. Upon that island Indians would have given up and have died. Gist himself, a strong man, had stopped at the river, and had wished to turn down. But George Washington had said: “We will cross,” and cross they did, and here they were.
“You will never have tighter squeezes for life, major,” Christopher Gist declared, as they all travelled on. “Bullet, drowning and freezing—I tell you, you narrowly escaped. You’re reserved for better fate.”