Ben looked at the speaker with his usual good-natured grin.
“Well, all I can say,” remarked he, “is that it must be in the air. If Mr. Revere begins to take notions about things also, why, I’ll have to take general charge of the party, that’s all.”
When the shadows began to lengthen by the roadside and thicken among the clumps of trees and tall brush, they were still some miles south of Bristol. The Delaware rippled smoothly on the right, and here and there the filled sail of a sloop could be seen as it made its way up river with wind and tide.
“What building is that ahead?” asked Nat, after a time.
They had rounded a bend in the road, and a stone structure, smoke-begrimed and forlorn looking, showed itself blackly against the sky-line.
“I don’t know,” replied Ben. “I’ve never traveled this route before. But it looks like a burned mill or something of the sort.”
There are things and there are persons whom one naturally suspects; there may be no reason for it that one can see, but still the suspicion grows stronger and stronger; and often it turns out that there is cause for it. When they came in sight of the ruined mill, frowning gloomily out upon the road, Nat Brewster felt just such a suspicion growing in his mind. More than once, among his native hills in the north, he had run upon an ambuscade—a crouching panther perhaps; and once a murderous red man. And so it was a kind of second nature to him to regard suspicious places with caution and to advance upon them with his eyes wide open.
Accordingly, as they rode toward the burned building, he eyed it narrowly; when they were within fifty yards of it his vigilance was rewarded, for he caught sight of a man’s head cautiously lifted above the edge of one of the openings that were once windows.
Instantly the boy struck his spurs into the tall black; the animal, startled, fought for its head, and finding that the strong hand upon the rein did not give an inch, it raced forward. A score of bounds brought it alongside of Ezra and Mr. Revere, and they, surprised at the sudden burst of speed, were turning their heads, when:
“Halt!” said Nat, sharply.