It was so easy for an excited young mind to plan great things and to expect success under apparently impossible conditions.

Beverley gave Jean a note for Alice; it was this that took him to Roussillon place; and no sooner fell the night than he shouldered a gun furnished him by Madame Godere, and guided by the woodsman's fine craft, stole away southward, thinking to swim the icy Wabash some miles below, and then strike across the plains of Illinois to Kaskaskia.
It was a desperate undertaking; but in those days desperate undertakings were rather the rule than the exception.

Moreover, love was the leader and Beverley the blind follower.

Nothing could daunt him or turn him back, until he found an army to lead against Hamilton.

It seems but a romantic burst of indignation, as we look back at it, hopelessly foolish, with no possible end but death in the wilderness.
Still there was a method in love's madness, and Beverley, with his superb physique, his knowledge of the wilderness and his indomitable self-reliance, was by no means without his fighting chance for success..