His expression softened. He even looked at me with pity.
"Well, it's the word of a Yankee," he said, "but still—it may be the truth. Remember that on your word of honor you are to tell nothing about Fort Defiance, its approaches or its plans."
"Certainly," I said, though secretly wondering.
He seemed to be relieved of his doubts, and, descending the last slope, we walked at a brisk pace down the valley.
I was surprised at the evidences of care and cultivation, though the fat, black soil of the valley would justify all the labor that might be put upon it. The fences were good, the fields well trimmed, and we soon entered a smooth road. Everything seemed to have the neatness and precision of the proprietor, the man with whom I was walking. I looked at him again, and was struck with the evidences of long military habit; not alone his uniform, but even more decidedly his manner and bearing.
We passed some outhouses built in a better manner than I had seen elsewhere in the mountain valleys, and approached a large square building which I knew at first sight to be Fort Defiance, since it could be nothing else. It was of two stories, made of heavy logs, unhewn on the outside, the upper story projecting over the lower, after the fashion of the block-houses of the frontier time. I supposed it to be some such building, standing here after the lapse of a hundred years in all its ancient solidity and devoted now to more peaceful uses.
The valley was no less pleasant to eye than to mind. When one is sore and hungry, mountains lose their picturesqueness and grandeur; a crust and a bed are infinitely more beautiful, and this valley promised both and better. The house stood upon a hill which rose to some height and was shaped like a truncated cone. The little river flowed around three sides of the hill in a swift, deep current. The fourth side I could not see, but the three washed at the base by the river were so steep a man could climb them only with great difficulty. It was a position of much natural strength, and in the old times, when rifles were the heaviest weapons used in these regions, it must have been impregnable except to surprise.
The road we were following curved around and approached the house from the south side, the side which at first had been hidden from me, and then I saw it was the only ordinary way by which one could enter Fort Defiance. But even here art had been brought to the aid of nature. A wide, deep ditch leading from the river had been carried around the south side, and the mound was completely encircled by water. We crossed the ditch on a drawbridge let down by an old man in Confederate gray like his master, though his was stained and more ancient.