It was a strange experience for a boy, and Neil had become such a queer combination of outspoken child and shrewd veteran as can be matched in these days only by the gamins who fight their battles in the city streets. Without losing his boyishness he had acquired a military swagger which he knew enough to suppress when there was any advantage to be gained by acting like a child, and underneath swagger and boyishness there burned the revengeful, deep-seated hatred of Tories which marked all but a few of the patriots of those days. In Neil it was an unchildlike passion, giving him strength on long marches, putting a keen barb to his wit, making him trusted in the army beyond his years.
Before the real beginning of the Revolution his father had been hanged by the Tory government for taking part in a popular outbreak, and his mother had been crazed by grief. From the shadow of such an early childhood Neil had emerged almost a man in purpose at thirteen and very fierce at heart.
Yet, in spite of a bronzed face, he was still exceedingly coltish and immature in appearance, with round, wide-open blue eyes, a shock of long, sunburned hair, and legs that also were long and sunburned, having seldom been covered by a substantial, untorn garment. There was a great amount of speed available in the bare legs, and under the shock of hair there was plenty of boyish logic and common sense.
Altogether, he was handy to have about, and he was sent on so many errands from officer to officer that he was known around all the cheerless campfires in Greene’s army. Even the general kept him in mind, and at times permitted him to undertake important missions. He had carried more than one of the appeals for reënforcements which Greene kept sending to the governors of North and South Carolina and Virginia, and to the military leaders of the three states. His way had lain through a country swarming with enemies, and he had come safely through encounters in which a man’s errand would have been investigated.
One night, during the anxious two weeks before the Battle of Guilford Court House, Greene sent for him again. The army was moving stealthily along muddy roads through the dusk of starlight, for the general thought his force still too weak to risk an engagement and evaded Cornwallis by shifting his camp every twenty-four hours, in the dark. The footsore men plodded forward silently. Loss of sleep was wearing them out. Greene himself had hardly slept for a week, and physical exhaustion united with his judgment in declaring that the strain could not last much longer. If sufficient reënforcements did not arrive soon, he would have to fight without them, and disaster would result. He sighed and settled himself wearily in the saddle. For a moment his overburdening anxiety slipped from him, and he dozed as he rode. Then he straightened himself with a start. A small lanky figure had bobbed up beside his horse out of the obscurity of the night, and he caught the motion of a salute.
“Ah, Neil,� he said, “I sent for you to see if you are ready to undertake another dangerous errand. I fear my last message to Colonel William Campbell has been intercepted. I want some one to go out, try to meet him, and hurry him forward. If he has not heard of our recent movements, he may be marching toward the Dan River.�
He hesitated a moment, as if he had more to say, but Neil did not wait for it. “I’m your man, sir!� he declared.
The general smiled at the boy’s confidence. “That was my impression, too,� he admitted. “Yet there is one strong argument against your going. Gillespie, one of the scouts, has just come in. He’s been hanging around Tarleton’s Legion and he’s heard you spoken of. It seems that the enemy took notice of you in the affair at the mill the other day, and that rascal who has your name, Davidson, the bushwhacker, is with the Legion, and he swears to capture you; so if any of Tarleton’s men come across a boy of your size and description, he will have hard work to get away from them.�
“But even if they are on the lookout for a boy, they’re just as much on the lookout for every grown man in your army,� Neil urged. “Anybody that the Tories get hold of will have to give a good account of himself.�
“So I reasoned,� the general said, “and at the same time I am unwilling to have you undertake this without some safeguard. You are about the height of an ordinary young woman, and when we reach Mrs. Bynum’s plantation, where we shall make our next camp, I shall have her furnish you with clothing and a side-saddle, and you will go disguised as a girl. That is all for the present. Report to me at the Bynum house as soon as you reach the plantation, and keep this to yourself in the meantime.�