Nor could my duty, fighting blindly, expect encouragement from her I loved, save at the last gasp and under the heel of love.  Then, only, at the very last would she save me; for there was that within her which revolted at a final wrong, and I knew that not even our twin passion could prevail to stamp out the last spark of conscience and slay our souls forever.

Brooding, as I trudged forward through the dust, I became aware that the drums had ceased their beating, and that the men were marching quietly with little laughter or noise of song.

The heat was intense, although a black cloud had pushed up above the west, veiling the sun.  Flies swarmed about the column; sweat poured from men and horses; the soldiers rolled back their sleeves and plodded on, muskets a-trail and coats hanging over their shoulders.  Once, very far away, the looming horizon was veined with lightning; and, after a long time, thunder sounded.

We had marched northward on a rutty road some two miles or more from our camp at Oriska, and I was asking Mount how near we were to the old Algonquin-Iroquois trail which runs from the lakes across the wilderness to the healing springs at Saratoga, when the column halted and I heard an increasing confusion of voices from the van.

“There’s a ravine ahead,” said Elerson.  “I’m thinking they’ll have trouble with these wagons, for there’s a swamp at the bottom and only a log-road across.”

“Tis the proper shpot f’r to ambuscade us,” observed Murphy, craning his neck and standing on tiptoe to see ahead.

We walked forward and sat down on the bank close to the brow of the hill.  Directly ahead a ravine, shaped like a half-moon, cut the road, and the noisy Canajoharie regiment was marching into it.  The bottom of the ravine appeared to be a swamp, thinly timbered with tamarack and blue-beech saplings, where the reeds and cattails grew thick, and little, dark pools of water spread, all starred with water-lilies, shining intensely white in the gloom of the coming storm.

“There do be wild ducks in thim rushes,” said Murphy, musingly.  “Sure I count it sthrange, Jack Mount, that thim burrds sit quiet-like an’ a screechin’ rigiment marchin’ acrost that log-road.”

“You mean that somebody has been down there before and scared the ducks away?” I asked.

“Maybe, sorr,” he replied, grimly.

Instinctively we leaned forward to scan the rising ground on the opposite side of the ravine.  Nothing moved in the dense thickets.  After a moment Mount said quietly:  “I’m a liar or there’s a barked twig showing raw wood alongside of that ledge.”

He glanced at the pan of his rifle, then again fixed his keen, blue eyes on the tiny glimmer of white which even I could distinguish now, though Heaven only knows how his eyes had found it in all that tangle.

“That’s raw wood,” he repeated.

“A deer might bark a twig,” said I.