"He's a liar!" he cried. "Yes, and a deserter, too, by thunder!"
Dick was astonished, but Frank Sacobie received the information calmly, without so much as a flicker of the eyelids.
"I think that all the time I listen to him," he said. "I figger to get his job, anyway, if he lie or tell the truth. I go down to-morrow, Peter, and you tell the colonel how I make a darn sight better soldier than Jim Hammond."
Peter gripped the others each by an arm.
"I shouldn't have said that," he cautioned them. "Forget it! You boys have got to keep it under your hats, but I guess it's up to me to take a jog out Pike Settlement way. If you boys say a word about it, you get in wrong with me and you get me in wrong with a whole heap of folks."
They turned and went back to Beaver Dam. There they hitched the mares to the big red pung and stowed in their blankets and half a bag of oats.
"I can't tell you where I'm going or what for, but only that it is a military duty," said Peter in answer to the questions of the family.
He took Dick and Frank Sacobie with him. Once they got beyond the outskirts of the home settlement they found heavy sledding. At noon they halted, blanketed and baited the mares, boiled the kettle and lunched. The wide, white roadway before them, winding between walls of green-black spruces and gray maples, was marked with only the tracks of one pair of horses and one pair of sled runners—evidently made the day before. Peter guessed them to be those of Mr. Hammond's team, but he said nothing about that to his companions.
Here and there they passed drifted clearings and little houses sending blue feathers of smoke into the bright air. They came to places where the team that had passed the previous day had been stuck in the drifts and laboriously dug out.
They were within two miles of the settlement, between heavy woods fronted with tangled alders, when the cracking whang! of exploding cordite sounded in the underbrush. The mares plunged, then stood. The reins slipped from Peter's mittened hands.