The wearisome monotony of a close garrison, with so ungenial a companion, would have damped any man’s spirits but O’Flaherty’s.  He, however, upon this, as other occasions in life, rallied himself to make the best of it; and by short excursions within certain prescribed limits along the river side, contrived to shoot and fish enough to get through the day, and improve the meagre fare of his mess-table.  Malone never appeared before dinner—­his late sittings at night requiring all the following day to recruit him for a new attack upon the rum bottle.

Now, although his seeing so little of his brother officer was any thing but unpleasant to O’Flaherty, yet the ennui of such a life was gradually wearing him, and all his wits were put in requisition to furnish occupation for his time.  Never a day passed without his praying ardently for an attack from the enemy; any alternative, any reverse, had been a blessing compared with his present life.  No such spirit, however, seemed to animate the Yankee troops; not a soldier was to be seen for miles around, and every straggler that passed the Fort concurred in saying that the Americans were not within four day’s march of the frontier.

Weeks passed over, and the same state of things remaining unchanged, O’Flaherty gradually relaxed some of his strictness as to duty; small foraging parties of three and four being daily permitted to leave the Fort for a few hours, to which they usually returned laden with wild turkeys and fish—­both being found in great abundance near them.

Such was the life of the little garrison for two or three long summer months—­each day so resembling its fellow, that no difference could be found.

As to how the war was faring, or what the aspect of affairs might be, they absolutely knew nothing.  Newspapers never reached them; and whether from having so much occupation at head-quarters, or that the difficulty of sending letters prevented, their friends never wrote a line; and thus they jogged on, a very vegetable existence, till thought at last was stagnating in their brains, and O’Flaherty half envied his companion’s resource in the spirit flask.

Such was the state of affairs at the Fort, when one evening O’Flaherty appeared to pace the little rampart that looked towards Lake Ontario, with an appearance of anxiety and impatience strangely at variance with his daily phlegmatic look.  It seemed that the corporal’s party he had despatched that morning to forage, near the “Falls,” had not returned, and already were four hours later than their time away.

Every imaginable mode of accounting for their absence suggested itself to his mind.  Sometimes he feared that they had been attacked by the Indian hunters, who were far from favourably disposed towards their poaching neighbours.  Then, again, it might be merely that they had missed their track in the forest; or could it be that they had ventured to reach Goat Island in a canoe, and had been carried down the rapids.