“Gawd!” he said again, with a grin that showed every magnificent tooth in his head. “Jest as well try to ketch a streak o’ lightning.” And quite undisturbed he turned to tell the news to old Mammy.
XXIV
Up the James rode Erskine, hiding in the woods by day and slipping cautiously along the sandy road by night, circling about Tarleton’s camp-fires, or dashing at full speed past some careless sentinel. Often he was fired at, often chased, but with a clear road in front of him he had no fear of capture. On the third morning he came upon a ragged sentinel—an American. Ten minutes later he got his first glimpse of Lafayette, and then he was hailed joyfully by none other than Dave Yandell, Captain Dave Yandell, shorn of his woodsman’s dress and panoplied in the trappings of war.
Cornwallis was coming on. The boy, he wrote, cannot escape me. But the boy—Lafayette—did, and in time pursued and forced the Englishman into a cul-de-sac. “I have given his lordship the disgrace of a retreat,” said Lafayette. And so—Yorktown!
Late in August came the message that put Washington’s great “soul in arms.” Rochambeau had landed six thousand soldiers in Connecticut, and now Count de Grasse and a French fleet had sailed for the Chesapeake. General Washington at once resorted to camouflage. He laid out camps ostentatiously opposite New York and in plain sight of the enemy. He made a feigned attack on their posts. Rochambeau moved south and reached the Delaware before the British grasped the Yankee trick. Then it was too late. The windows of Philadelphia were filled with ladies waving handkerchiefs and crying bravoes when the tattered Continentals, their clothes thick with dust but hats plumed with sprigs of green, marched through amid their torn battle-flags and rumbling cannon. Behind followed the French in “gay white uniforms faced with green,” and martial music throbbed the air. Not since poor André had devised the “Mischianza” festival had Philadelphia seen such a pageant. Down the Chesapeake they went in transports and were concentrated at Williamsburg before the close of September. Cornwallis had erected works against the boy, for he knew nothing of Washington and Count de Grasse, nor Mad Anthony and General Nelson, who were south of the James to prevent escape into North Carolina.
“To your goodness,” the boy wrote to Washington, “I am owning the most beautiful prospect I may ever behold.”
Then came de Grasse, who drove off the British fleet, and the mouth of the net was closed.
Cornwallis heard the cannon and sent Clinton to appeal for help, but the answer was Washington himself at the head of his army. And then the joyous march.
“’Tis our first campaign!” cried the French gayly, and the Continentals joyfully answered: