“Hold a window before your face, with a light in the window, and stand back by the roadside in the cedars.”
“That would be a strange thing for me to do, Dennis. How would that help the cause?”
“You know all the people of the town. You would know a stranger to be a stranger. Now, no stranger can pass down the turnpike at night without a passport. If he does, he is an enemy or a spy.
“You are to stand behind the lighted window at night back in the cedars, some distance from the road. If you see a stranger coming down the road at night, or hear him, you are to leave the window and light on a post and demand his passport. The window and light at a distance will look like a house. If the traveler have no passport, you must ask him to follow you at a distance toward the light in the window. Hear: ‘at a distance.’
“Then you are to take the window and the light and move up the hill, by the brook ways, so that I can see the light at the alarm-post. Then you may put out the light, and run for the war office: run like the wind. That will detain the spy, should he be one, and we will be warned and thwart his design. Do you see?”
“I see, but am I to be stationed near a cave where the powder is hidden?”
“No—tish, tish—but at a place that would turn a night traveler from the place where the powder is concealed. You yourself are not to know, or to seek to know, where the powder is hidden. No, no—tish, tish. If you were to be overpowered, you must be able to say that you do not know where the saltpeter is. Tish, tish!”
“That is a strange service, Dennis, but I will do as you say. I will watch by the window in the heat and cold, in the rain and snow, and I will never desert my post.”
“That you will, my boy. The true heart never deserts its post. You may save an army by this strange service. You are no longer to be Peter Nimble, but a window in the cedars. Ah, Peter, Peter, not in vain did the old man send you out. Boy, the Governor likes you, and you are my heart’s own!”