"We'll keep clus together," Solomon whispered. "We got to push right on an' work 'round 'em. If any one gits in our way, he'll have to change worlds sudden, that's all. We mus' git to them hosses 'fore midnight."
Darkness had fallen, but the moon was rising when they set out. Solomon led the way, with that long, loose stride of his. Their moccasined feet were about as noiseless as a cat's. On and on they went until Solomon stopped suddenly and stood listening and peering into the dark bush beyond. Jack could hear and see nothing. Solomon turned and took a new direction without a word and moving with the stealth of a hunted Indian. Jack followed closely. Soon they were sinking to their knees in a mossy tamarack swamp, but a few minutes of hard travel brought them to the shore of a pond.
"Wait here till I git the canoe," Solomon whispered.
The latter crept into a thicket and soon Jack could hear him cautiously shoving his canoe into the water. A little later the young man sat in the middle of the shell of birch bark while Solomon knelt in its stern with his paddle. Silently he pushed through the lilied margin of the pond into clear water. The moon was hidden behind the woods. The still surface of the pond was now a glossy, dark plane between two starry deeps--one above, the other beneath. In the shadow of the forest, near the far shore, Solomon stopped and lifted his voice in the long, weird cry of the great bush owl. This he repeated three times, when there came an answer out of the woods.
"That's a warnin' fer ol' Joe Thrasher," Solomon whispered. "He'll go out an' wake up the folks on his road an' start 'em movin'."
They landed and Solomon hid his canoe in a thicket.
"Now we kin skitter right long, but I tell ye we got purty clus to 'em back thar."
"How did you know it?"
"Got a whiff o' smoke. They was strung out from the pond landing over 'crost the trail. They didn't cover the swamp. Must 'a' had a fire for tea early in the evenin'. Wherever they's an Englishman, thar's got to be tea."
Before midnight they reached Remsen's barn and about two o'clock entered the camp on lathering horses. As they dismounted, looking back from the heights of Brooklyn toward the southeast, they could see a great light from many fires, the flames of which were leaping into the sky.