"No sooner had I detected the deficiency," pursued Colonel Forrester, "than I knew the day would be my own, since the obstacles opposed to your attempt would admit of my spreading my men over the whole line embraced within the attack. The result, you see, has justified my expectation. But enough of this. After the fatigues of the day, you must require both food and rest. Captain Jackson, I leave it to you to do the honors of hospitality towards Mr. Grantham, who will so shortly become your fellow-traveller; and if, when he has performed the ablutions he seems so much to require, my wardrobe can furnish anything your own cannot supply to transform him into a backwoodsman (in which garb I would strongly advise him to travel). I beg it may be put under contribution without ceremony."
So saying, Colonel Forrester departed to the rude log-hut that served him for his head-quarters, first enjoining his uncouth second to keep a sufficient number of men on the alert, and take such other precautions as were necessary to guard against surprise—an event, however, of which little apprehension was entertained, now that the British troops appeared to have been wholly withdrawn.
Sick, wearied, and unhappy, Gerald was but too willing to escape to the solitude of retirement, to refuse the offer which Captain Jackson made of his own bed, it being his intention to sit up all night in the mess-room, ready to communicate instantly with the Colonel in the event of any alarm.
Declining the pressing invitation of the officers to join in the repast they were about to make for the first time since the morning, and more particularly that of Captain Buckhorn, who strongly urged him to "bring himself to an anchor and try a little of the Wabash," he took a polite but hasty leave of them all, and was soon installed for the night in the Aid-de-camp's dormitory.
It would be idle to say that Gerald never closed his eyes that night—still more idle would it be to attempt a description of all that passed through a mind whose extent of wretchedness may be inferred from his several desperate although unsuccessful, efforts at the utter annihilation of all thought. When he met Colonel Forrester and his officers in the mess-room at breakfast, he was dressed, as had been recommended, in the hunting frock and belt of a backwoodsman; and in this his gentlemanly figure looked to such advantage as to excite general attention—so much so, indeed, that Major Killdeer was more than once detected in eyeing his own heavy person, as if to ascertain if the points of excellence were peculiar to the dress or to the man. Sick and dispirited as he was, Gerald felt the necessity of an attempt to rally, and however the moralist may condemn the principle, there is no doubt that he was considerably aided in his effort by one or two glasses of bitters which Captain Buckhorn strongly recommended as being of his wife's making, and well calculated to put some color into a man's face—an advantage in which, he truly remarked, Grantham was singularly deficient.
Accurate intelligence having been obtained from a party of scouts, who had been dispatched early in the morning to track their course, that the British General with his troops and Indians had finally departed, preparations were made about midday for the interment of the fallen. Two large graves were accordingly dug on the outer brow of the ravine, and in these the bodies of the fallen soldiers were deposited, with all the honors of war. A smaller grave, within the fort, and near the spot where they so nobly fell, was considerately allotted to Cranstoun and Middlemore. There was a composedness on the brow of the former that likened him, even in death, to the living man; while, about the good-humored mouth of poor Middlemore, played the same sort of self-satisfied smile that had always been observable there when about to deliver himself of a sally. Gerald, who had imposed upon himself the painful duty of attending to their last committal to earth, could not help fancying that Middlemore must have breathed his last with an inaudible pun upon his lips—an idea that inexpressibly affected him. Weighed down with sorrow as was his own soul, he had yet a tear for the occasion—not that his brave comrades were dead, but that they had died with so much to attach them to life—while he whose hope was in death alone, had been chained, as by a curse to an existence compared with which death was the first of human blessings.
On the following morning, after an early breakfast, he and Captain Jackson quitted the fort, Colonel Forrester—who had not failed to remark that the brusque manner of his aide-de-camp was not altogether understood by his charge—taking occasion at parting, to assure the latter that, with all his eccentricity, he was a kind-hearted man, whom he had selected to be near him more for his personal courage, zeal, and general liberality of feeling, than for any qualifications of intellect he possessed.
The means provided for their transport into the interior were well assimilated to the dreariness of the country through which they passed. Two common pack-horses, lean, galled by the saddle, and callous from long acquaintance with the admonitory influence both of whip and spur, had been selected by Captain Jackson as the best within the fort. Neither were the trappings out of keeping with the steeds they decked. Moth-eaten saddles, almost black with age, beneath which were spread pieces of dirty blanket to prevent further excoriation of the already bared and reeking back—bridles, the original thickness of which had been doubled by the incrustation of mould and dirt that pertinaciously adhered to them—stirrups and bits, with their accompanying buckles—the absence of curb chains being supplied by pieces of rope—all afforded evidence of the wretchedness of resource peculiar to a back settlement population. Over the hard saddles, however, had been strapped the blankets which, when the travellers were fortunate enough to meet with a hut at the close of their day's ride, or, as was more frequently the case, when compelled to bivouac in the forest before the fire kindled by the industry of the hardy aide-de-camp, served them as their only couch of rest, while the small leather valise tied to the pummel of the saddle, and containing their scanty wardrobe, was made to do the duty of the absent pillow. The blanket Gerald found to be the greatest advantage of his grotesque equipment—so much so, indeed, that when compelled, by the heavy rains which took place shortly after their departure, to make it serve, after the fashion of a backwoodsman, as a covering for his loins and shoulders, he was obliged to own that his miseries, great as they were, were yet susceptible of increase.
Notwithstanding Captain Jackson had taken what he considered to be the best of the two Rosinantes for himself. Gerald had no reason to deny the character for kind-heartedness given of him by Colonel Forrester. Frequently when winding through some dense forest, or moving over some extensive plain where nothing beyond themselves told of the existence of man, his companion would endeavor to divert him from the abstraction and melancholy in which he was usually plunged, and, ascribing his melancholy to an unreal cause, seek to arouse him by the consolatory assurance that he was not the first man who had been taken prisoner—adding that there was no use in snivelling, as "what was done couldn't be undone, and no great harm neither, as there was some as pretty gals in Kaintuck as could be picked out in a day's ride; and that to a good-looking young fellow like himself, with nothing to do but make love to them, that ought to be no mean consideration, enabling him, as it would, to while away the tedium of captivity." At other times he would launch forth into some wild rhapsody, the invention of the moment, or seek to entertain his companion with startling anecdotes connected with his encounters with the Indians on the Wabash, (where he had formerly served) in the course of which much of the marvellous, to call it by the most indulgent term, was necessarily mixed up—not perhaps that he was quite sensible of this himself, but because he possessed a constitutional proneness to exaggeration that rendered him even more credulous of the good things he uttered than those to whom he detailed them.
But Gerald heard without being amused, and, although he felt thankful for the intention, was distressed that his abstraction should be the subject of notice, and his despondency the object of care. To avoid this he frequently suffered Jackson to take the lead, and, following some distance in the rear with his arms folded and the reins loose upon the horse's neck, often ran the risk of having his own neck broken by the frequent stumbling of the unsure-footed beast. But the Captain as often returned to the charge, for, in addition to a sincere desire to rally his companion, he began at length to find it exceedingly irksome to travel with one who neither spoke himself, nor appeared to enjoy speech in another; and when he had amused himself with whistling, singing, hallooing, and cutting a thousand antics with his arms, until he was heartily tired of each of these several diversions, he would rein in his horse to suffer Gerald to come up, and, after a conciliating offer of his rum flask, accompanied by a slice of hung beef that lined the wallet depending from his shoulder, enter upon some new and strange exploit, of which he was as usual the hero. Enforced in a degree to make some return for the bribe offered to his patience, Gerald would lend—all he could—his ear to the tale; but long before the completion he would give such evidence of his distraction, as utterly to disconcert the narrator, and cause him finally to have recourse to one of the interludes above described.