The Spy: Condensed for use in schools

by James Fenimore Cooper

FRANCES REMINDS MR. HARPER OF HIS PROMISE.

Frances could no longer doubt that the figure she had seen on the hill was Birch, and she felt certain that, instead of flying to the friendly forces below, her brother would be taken to the mysterious hut to pass the night. Therefore she held a long and animated discussion with her aunt; when the good spinster reluctantly yielded to the representation of her niece, and folding her in her arms, she kissed the cold cheek and fervently blessing her allowed her to depart on an errand of fraternal love.

The night had set in dark and chilling as Frances Wharton, with a beating heart but light step, moved through the little garden that lay behind the farm-house which had been her brother’s prison, and took her way to the foot of the mountain, where she had seen the figure of him she supposed to be the peddler.

Without pausing to reflect, however, she flew over the ground with a rapidity that seemed to bid defiance to all impediments, nor stopped even to breathe, until she had gone half the distance to the rock that she had marked as the spot where Birch made his appearance on that very morning.

When she heard the footsteps of a horse moving slowly up the road, she shrank timidly into a little thicket of wood which grew around the spring that bubbled from the side of a hillock near her. Frances listened anxiously to the retreating footsteps of the horse; and, as they died upon her ear, she ventured from her place of secrecy and advanced a short distance into the field, where, startled at the gloom and appalled with the dreariness of the prospect, she paused to reflect on what she had undertaken.

Throwing back the hood of her cardinal,[121] she sought the support of a tree and gazed towards the summit of the mountain that was to be the goal of her enterprise. It rose from the plain like a huge pyramid, giving nothing to the eye but its outlines.

Frances turned her looks towards the east, in earnest gaze at the clouds which constantly threatened to involve her again in comparative darkness. Had an adder stung her, she could not have sprung with greater celerity than she recoiled from the object against which she was leaning, and which she had for the first time noticed. The two upright posts, with a cross-beam on their tops and a rude platform beneath, told but too plainly the nature of the structure; even the cord was suspended from an iron staple, and was swinging to and fro in the night air. Frances hesitated no longer, but rather flew than ran across the meadow, and was soon at the base of the rock, where she hoped to find something like a path to the summit of the mountain. She soon found a sheep-path that wound round the shelving rocks and among the trees.

Nearly an hour did she struggle with the numerous difficulties that she was obliged to overcome; when, having been repeatedly exhausted with her efforts, and, in several instances, in great danger from falls, she succeeded in gaining the small piece of table-land on the summit.

No hut nor any vestige of human being could she trace. The idea of her solitude struck on the terrified mind of the affrighted girl, and approaching to the edge of a shelving rock she bent forward to gaze on the signs of life in the vale; when a ray of keen light dazzled her eyes, and a warm ray diffused itself over her whole frame. Recovering from her surprise, Frances looked on the ledge beneath her, and at once perceived that she stood directly over the object of her search. A hole through its roof afforded a passage to the smoke which, as it blew aside, showed her a clear and cheerful fire crackling and snapping on a rude hearth of stone. The approach to the front of the hut was by a winding path around the point of the rock on which she stood, and by this she advanced to its door.

Three sides of this singular edifice were composed of logs laid alternately on each other, to a little more than the height of a man, and the fourth was formed by the rock against which it leaned. The roof was made of the bark of trees, laid in long strips from the rock to its eaves; the fissures[122] between the logs had been stuffed with clay, which in many places had fallen out, and dried leaves were made use of as a substitute to keep out the wind. A single window of four panes of glass was in front, but a board carefully closed it in such a manner as to emit no light from the fire within. After pausing some time to view this singularly constructed hiding-place, for such Frances knew it to be, she applied her eye to a crevice to examine the inside.