I thrust my hand into the breast-pocket of my coat, drew out the sealed orders, tore them open, and read: "Until further notice such reports as you are required to render to his Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief, should be sent to headquarters, near Yorktown, Virginia----"
Virginia! The army that I had seen at Dobbs Ferry, at White Plains, at North Castle, was that army on its way to Virginia? What! hurl an entire army a thousand miles southward? And had Sir Henry Clinton permitted it?
In a sort of stupor I read and reread the astonishing words: "Virginia? There was a British army in Virginia. Yorktown? Yes, that British army was at Yorktown, practically at bay, with a youth of twenty-three--my own age--harassing it--the young General Lafayette! Greene, too, was there, his chivalry cutting up the light troops of General Lord Cornwallis----"
"By Heaven!" I cried, springing to my feet, "his Excellency never meant to storm New York! The French fleet has sailed for the Chesapeake! Lafayette is there, Greene is there, Morgan, Sumter, Lee, Pickens, all are there! His Excellency has gone to catch Cornwallis in a mouse-trap, and Sir Henry is duped!"
Mad with excitement and delight, I looked up at the great fortress on the river, and knew that it was safe in its magnificent isolation--safe with its guns and ramparts and its four thousand men--knew that the key to the Hudson was ours, and would remain ours, although the army, like a gigantic dragon, had lifted its great wings and soared southward, so silently that none, not even the British spies, had dreamed its destination was other than the city of New York.
And, as I looked, the signals on the fortress changed; the guard-boats hailed us, the harmless river-craft gave us right of way, and we spread our white sails once more, drawing slowly northward, under the rocky pulpits of the heights, past shore forests yet unbroken, edged with acres of reeds and marshes, from which the water-fowl arose in clouds; past pine-crowned capes and mountains, whose bases were bathed in the great river; past lonely little islands, on, on, into the purple mystery of the silent north.
Now there remained no high sky-bastion to halt us with voiceless signal and dumb cannon, nothing beyond but Albany; and, beyond Albany, the frontier; and beyond the frontier a hellish war of murder and the torch, a ceaseless conflict of dreadful reprisals, sterile triumphs, terrible vengeance, a saturnalia of private feuds, which spared neither the infirm nor the infant--nay, the very watch-dog at the door received no quarter in the holocaust.
Elsin had begged and begged that she should not be left there at West Point, saying that Albany was safer, though I doubted the question of safety weighed in her choice; but she pleaded so reasonably, so sweetly, arms around my neck, and her lips whispering so that my cheek felt their soft flutter, that I consented. There I was foolish, for no sooner were we in sight of the Albany hills than arms and lips were persuading again, guilelessly explaining how simple it would be for her to live at Johnstown, while I, at Butlersbury, busied myself with my own affairs.