Some teamsters mending transport wagons gave me bread and meat enough to fill my pouch; and one of them, a kindly giant, took me over the Chemung dry shod, I clinging to his broad back like a very cat--and all o' them a-laughing fit to burst!...

Are you displeased, dear lad ?...
Then, just at night, I came up with the rear-guard, where they were searching for strayed cattle; and I stowed myself away in a broken-down wagon, full of powder--quietly, like a mouse, no one dreaming that I was not the slender youth I looked.

So none molested me where I lay amid the powder casks and sacking." She smiled wistfully, and stood caressing my arms with her eager little hands, as though to calm the wrath to come.
"I heard your regiment's pretty conch-horn in the morning," she said, "and slipped out of my wagon and edged forward amid all that swearing, sweating confusion, noticed not at all by anybody, save when a red-head Jersey sergeant bawled at me to man a rope and haul at the mired cannon with the others.

But I was deaf just then, Euan, and got free o' them with nothing worse than a sound cursing from the sergeant; and away across the creek I legged it, where I hid in the bush until the firing began and the horrid shouting on the ridge.

Then it was that, badly scared, I crept through the Indian grass like a hunted hare, and saw Lieutenant Boyd there, and his men, halted across the trail.