It required no small courage to carry out her purpose. The winter had set in early and severe. The river was running full of ice, which rendered crossing, especially by night, exceedingly perilous. To this was added the danger of being challenged, and it might be shot, by the sentries of the American camp. But when did true love in man or woman stop to calculate chances, or hesitate to encounter danger or even death for the beloved one?
It was on the 9th of December—a bleak, cold, cloudy night—that Mary, having secured the aid of her father's faithful servant, Michael O'Brian, a jolly but rather stupid Irishman, who knew no fear, escaped through the window of her room after the family had retired to rest, which was not till near midnight, and set forth on her perilous mission of mercy. In order to avoid the American sentries they attempted to cross about a mile above the camp, and in the murky darkness, fearlessly launched their little boat, steering by the lights in the town, slumbering unconscious of its fate, where some patient watcher kept her vigil beside a sick bed.
The dark water eddied and gurgled amid the ice-floes, from which a ghastly gleam was reflected, like that from the face of a corpse dimly seen amid the dark. Occasionally a huge fragment of ice would grate, and crash, and crunch against the frail ribs of the boat, as if eager to crush it and frustrate the generous purpose of its passengers. But the strong arm of O'Brian pushed a way through the ice, while Mary sat wrapped in her cloak and in busy meditation in the bottom of the boat.
But they had not calculated on the strength, of the current, and the resistance of the ice. In spite of every effort they were being rapidly borne down the stream. Another danger stared them in the face. Should they be carried into the lake with the floating ice, they might before morning be drifted out of sight of land and perish miserably of cold or hunger; or be dashed upon the ice- bound shore, where they could hear the waves roar harshly, like sea-beasts howling for their prey.
But the bitter north wind, which had been such a source of discomfort, now proved their salvation from this imminent danger. Blowing fresher every moment it arrested the ice-drift, and formed a solid barrier from shore to shore and extending far up the river. But this in turn effectually prevented the progress of the little boat which had almost readied the Canadian shore; and worse still, the dim grey light of morning began to dawn.
Suddenly the sight of a black object in the middle of a white field of now dense ice, and the sound of O'Brian's oar striving to force a passage through, caught the watchful eye and ear of the sentry near whose beat they had unfortunately drifted.
"Halt!" rang out sharp and clear on the frosty air the challenge of the sentry.
"Faith an' it's halted fast enough I am," answered Mickey.
"Who goes there?" repeated the sentry's voice.
"Sure I don't go at all, that's what's the matther," said the boatman, unconsciously anticipating a slang phrase of later times.