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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77341 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "If Miss Bee is willing I can drive her to the
+Towers."]
+
+
+
+
+  BEATRICE OF OLD YORK
+
+
+  BY
+
+  E. A. TAYLOR
+
+
+
+  _Illustrated by_
+  L. A. GOVEY
+
+
+
+  TORONTO
+  THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY, LIMITED
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1929
+
+  THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY, LTD.
+  PUBLISHERS TORONTO
+
+
+
+  PRINTED IN CANADA
+  T. H. BEST PRINTING CO., LIMITED
+  TORONTO, ONT.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I. How Bee Goode of Boston, came to England
+
+II. The Man who Preached in Noah's Ark and Some of His Hearers
+
+III. A Voyage to Canada in 1812
+
+IV. How Ned came to York (Toronto)
+
+V. How the Americans came to York, April 27, 1813
+
+VI. How Ned Lost His Good Name and Vere His Soul
+
+VII. How Ned Planned to Justify Bee's Faith in Him
+
+VIII. How Ned Had Many Adventures, and Bee becomes a Woman
+
+IX. How Ned Won the "Bubble Reputation", at the Cannon's Mouth
+
+X. How Vere came to Newark, and Bee consented to be Betrothed to Him
+
+XI. Kawque takes a Hand in the Game
+
+XII. How Bee was Abducted--and the End
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+"If Miss Bee is willing I can drive her to the Towers." ...
+_Frontispiece_
+
+"Miss Bee," exclaimed Ned, "are you hurt?  What is the matter?"
+
+"Dropped noiselessly overboard and swam ashore."
+
+"Outside in the bitter cold a crowd of women and children moved about
+aimlessly."
+
+"Take that! you coward!"
+
+"Then on the other side of the tree they saw her--or her spirit."
+
+
+
+BEATRICE OF OLD YORK
+
+
+
+
+Beatrice of Old York
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+How Bee Goode, of Boston, Came to England.
+
+The stage coach from Plymouth to London had left two passengers at
+Liddon, a little manufacturing town in a dimple of the great chalk
+downs of Dorsetshire.  Dobson, the coachman with the big carriage
+from Haslem Towers looked at them perplexed.  His orders from his
+master, Colonel Sir John Haslem, were to meet the stage.  Vere
+Haslem, Sir John's fifteen-year-old grandson and heir, had gone to
+Plymouth to meet his cousin, Beatrice Haslem, from York, in the
+mysterious far-off Canadas.  But Vere was not to be seen, and there
+only alighted from the coach an enormous negress with a scarlet and
+orange turban and a small white girl whom Dobson did not notice for a
+minute.  He was wondering in horror if this awful-looking savage
+could possibly be his master's granddaughter.  He knew that Mary
+Haslem had made a runaway marriage with an unknown American twenty
+years before, and that her father had sworn never to forgive her.
+But she and her husband were dead, and he had consented that the
+Canadian guardians of her youngest child, Beatrice, should send her
+to him, and call her by her mother's name of Haslem.
+
+Dobson had a vague idea that all Americans were Red Indians, and
+thinking that this black woman might be a variation of the race, he
+touched his cap in some trepidation, saying questioningly: "Miss
+Beatrice Haslem?"
+
+"I am Miss Bee Goode, of Boston," said the child by the side of the
+woman, in a composed, distinct voice.  Dobson looked at her; a slip
+of an eleven-year-old girl, pale-faced beside the rosy English
+children, and wearing the miniature woman's dress which was the
+fashion of the day--a green stuff gown, short-sleeved and cut low at
+the neck, with its waist-line under her arms, and a straight, narrow
+skirt.  On her yellow curls she wore a very large straw bonnet
+trimmed with flowers, and tied under her chin with huge bows of
+ribbon.  Long black lace mitts and a handbag of gay flowered chintz
+completed her costume.
+
+"She's Haslem all right--furren too, though," thought Dobson
+embarrassed by her unchildlike, shrewd, gray eyes.  Then he said
+aloud, "I was to meet Mr. Vere, and Miss Beatrice Haslem, Miss."
+
+"I do not like my cousin Vere," said the child calmly, "and he stayed
+behind at Plymouth.  Also my name is Goode, and unless you call me by
+it I will not go with you to see my grandfather."
+
+Dobson looked helpless, and a boy came forward from among the
+interested spectators of the little scene.  He looked about fifteen,
+with a sturdy figure, and honest, good-tempered face.  He wore a tall
+black silk hat, and a man's suit of bright blue cloth, the coat with
+long flapping tails and a very high stiff collar.  "Dobson," he said,
+"I have the pony here, and if Miss Bee is willing I can drive her to
+the Towers, while you take her maid and the baggage.  And Dobson, you
+needn't mention Mr. Vere not being here."  Then turning to Bee he
+added formally, "I am Ned Edgar, at your service, Miss Bee, I think
+you may have heard of me."
+
+Ned had thought Bee very homely till he spoke to her; then he saw her
+eyes grow soft in an instant, and her cold little face flashed with
+smiles that made her fascinating, if not lovely.  "Oh, I know your
+father," she exclaimed, "He is Mr. Edgar, fur-trader, of York in
+Upper Canada.  I love him and Mrs. Edgar, your step-mother.  I have
+lived with them since my mother died; and I was hoping to meet you
+when I came here."
+
+So Ned drove Bee through the narrow streets of the town, pointing out
+the old house in its big garden, where he lived with Dr. Brown, his
+dead mother's father.  "He is a Friend," said Ned, "but as the
+Friends have no meeting house here we go to the Methodist
+chapel--that's it there--we call it Noah's Ark."
+
+"I know Mr. Edgar went to Canada when you were born and your mother
+died," said Bee.  "But he never said you were a Methodist; he don't
+like them at all."
+
+"I'm not a professor yet," Ned answered, then had some trouble to
+explain to Bee what it meant.  The woollen workers of Liddon were
+almost all Methodists, while out of the town the gentry and their
+farmer tenants went to the Church of England, the two classes living
+entirely separate lives.  Ned went to school with Vere Haslem, and a
+friendship had grown between the boys, partly because it was
+discouraged by the elders on both sides.  To Sir John, Ned was a
+tradesman's son, brought up in the unspeakable religion of the
+Quakers, and a most unfit companion for a Haslem, all of whom were
+"soldiers and gentlemen".  While in straight-laced Liddon to become a
+professor--to profess conversion--was the one aim in life.  They took
+their religion very seriously; classes, preachings, and quarterly
+meetings were their only dissipations, and many heads were shaken
+over Ned's friendship with handsome, idle Vere, brought up to think a
+gentleman's business was war, his amusements heavy drinking and
+hunting, and his only religion a soldier's code of honour.  And
+Liddon groaned over Sundays at the Towers, spent in cock-fighting,
+hunting or cards, winding up with the dinner, where often every man,
+including the parish rector, got drunk.
+
+Ned wondered how bright, odd, Bee would get on with her autocratic
+grandfather; then asked how it happened Vere was not with her.
+
+"I detest the creature," said Bee decidedly.  "He laughed at my name,
+and went with some horrid boys to a cock-fight.  And as it was time
+for the stage to start I came on with Mammy Chloe and left him."
+
+"Vere generally wriggles out of his scrapes," said Ned, "and I expect
+he posted up after you, but Sir John will be very angry with him if
+he knows he didn't obey him and come with you."
+
+"I don't tell tales," said Bee contemptuously; then she exclaimed in
+delighted wonder, for they had left the town, and driven through
+great gates into a wooded park.
+
+It was Haslem Towers, Ned told her, and Bee forgot to keep up her air
+of American indifference to all things English as they drove up the
+long winding avenue of glorious oaks and elms.  Large-eyed deer moved
+among the trees, and Bee exclaimed again as she saw a flash of water.
+They came out by a little lake where white swans sailed, and beyond
+it, flanked by pleasure gardens, rose a stately pile of white
+stone--the Towers.
+
+"The three towers are two hundred feet high and the newest part of it
+is three hundred years old," said Ned.  "I don't know when a Haslem
+didn't live here."
+
+"Cousin Vere said he would have it all when grandfather dies," said
+Bee.  "It's too good for him.  Who will have it when he dies?"
+
+"Oh, he'll grow up and have children most likely, but just now the
+next heir is Captain Percy Haslem.  His wife, Mrs. Betty, is staying
+at the Towers, and he is visiting there, for his regiment is marching
+from Ireland across England, and is camping to-night in this
+neighbourhood."
+
+They went through the great doors into a vast hall, where Bee was
+welcomed by Sir John, a militant looking old gentleman,
+sharp-tongued, rather thick-headed, and very soft-hearted where his
+own were concerned.  With him was Betty Haslem, a very pretty young
+woman, with affectedly languid manners, and dressed in a
+high-waisted, narrow-skirted Empire gown of flowered muslin.  Her
+fair hair was piled on the top of her head, and ringlets hung down on
+either side.
+
+They were both prepared to be very kind to a nervous child, but Bee
+was not at all shy.  She said she had let Ned bring her because she
+knew his father, and no one asked after Vere.  Betty's afternoon
+"dish of tea" was brought in, with more solid refreshments, which Ned
+found he had to sit down to with Bee.  He refused to touch the fruit
+pie which was pressed on him, then the sweet cakes too, while he felt
+himself growing furiously red under Betty's disdainful eyes.
+
+"I protest, uncle," she said to Sir John, "I never knew a boy to
+refuse everything sweet before.  What ails the creature?"
+
+"He is a Methodist, Betty," said Sir John dryly, "and I believe that
+it's one of the articles of their faith not to eat sugar."
+
+"A Methodist!  I hear of them everywhere," exclaimed Betty.  "But I
+shall die of curiosity if someone doesn't tell me at once why the
+creatures won't eat sweets."
+
+"It is only sugar that Friends and many Methodists won't eat, Mrs.
+Haslem," said Ned flushing.  "We are pledged not to taste sugar or
+rum till slavery is abolished in our West Indies.  We use honey for
+sweetening."
+
+"Then you can't make pastry or light cakes," said Betty; "honey would
+make them soggy."
+
+"I have never tasted pie in my life, Mrs. Haslem," smiled Ned.
+
+"You can when you go to your father in Canada," said Bee, "for there
+they get their sugar out of maple trees, and anyhow Canada abolished
+slavery in 1797."
+
+Sir John asked Bee about her voyage, and she answered directly, "We
+had a very quick one, sir, only twenty-seven days.  We left Quebec on
+July 14 and reached Plymouth on August 10.  There were forty-two
+ships in our convoy, with the warship 'Primrose' to guard us from the
+wicked French."
+
+Sir John chatted with her, so pleased with her intelligence and
+fearlessness, that when at last she boldly said that she must be
+called by her father's name, he only laughed.  "She's too fine for
+rough handling," he thought.
+
+"A little thoroughbred all through," he told Mrs. Betty later, "and a
+few years of proper English living will make her ashamed to own that
+she had such a scoundrel father.  I'll wager that she's all Haslem,
+not a low drop of blood in her.  Queer too, when her father was one
+of that crew of pirates and matricides who, with less morals than
+savages, fought us under Washington, and made most of our American
+colonies into an infernal Republic.  Ay, and now in 1810, when we're
+fighting single-handed with that crowned hyena Bonaparte, all their
+sympathy is with those French assassins."
+
+Meanwhile Betty talked to Ned, dropping her scorn and affection.  The
+boy's simple manliness had won her respect, and when he left she
+shook hands with him, though Sir John raised his eyebrows.  "It's no
+kindness, Betty, to give the lower class ideas above their station,"
+he said.  "Ned will do well unless he thinks he ought to be better
+than his birth made him, then he'll go wrong, mark my words.  He's
+being educated too much as it is."
+
+"La, uncle," yawned Betty, "it's easy to see you were born long
+before the French Revolution; since that upset nobody really believes
+in anything.  I'm an atheist in politics as well as in religion."
+
+"Don't, Betty, before the child.  I'm thankful you are a lady-born."
+
+"And so can't go wrong, eh?  Well, I was taught that as long as a
+man's not a coward or liar, everything can be excused, and I really
+think Methodism is as excusable as some things I have been required
+to overlook in fine gentlemen.  A boy who refuses sweets for
+conscience' sake, and won't give way even when a woman ridicules him
+can never be a coward or tell a lie.  And if I were Vere's guardian,
+I should encourage his friendship with Ned Edgar."
+
+Sir John frowned, but before he could retort, Vere, a very handsome
+boy, came in.  He was followed by Percy Haslem in his captain's
+uniform, who, like Betty, his wife, spoke and moved with affected
+langour.
+
+Sir John spoke irritatedly to Vere.  "How is it, sir, that you left
+your cousin to be brought home by that doctor's boy?"
+
+"Oh, Ned's all right, sir.  He met the coach and claimed Bee because
+his father was her guardian in Canada, so I rode over to meet Cousin
+Percy."
+
+"Insolence," growled Sir John.  "To think he had such assurance, and
+I was blaming you for running off and letting him do it.  Mark my
+words, it would be a kindness to give that boy a lesson that would
+break his proud spirit, otherwise he'll end on the gallows."
+
+"Don't uncle, before the child!" mimicked Betty.  "You'll frighten
+her."
+
+"I'm not ever afraid of white men," said Bee calmly.  "I'm only
+afraid of Red Indians when they have war paint on.  I hate them; and
+I despise white men who tell lies."
+
+"Haslem all through," chuckled Sir John, but Vere flushed angrily.
+He knew by instinct that Bee would not tell tales, but he hated her
+for her contempt of him, as he had never hated anyone before.
+
+Sir John was talking to Percy who had just returned from unhappy
+south Ireland to whom England then was too busy to show justice, much
+less mercy.  His regiment had been recruited there, and the country
+was in such dangerous ferment that all Irish soldiery had been
+withdrawn, and English sent there.  Sir John denounced all Irish,
+"Traitors and papists!" he growled.  "A heavy hand and the cat o'
+nine tails is the only way to keep them down."
+
+"This regiment isn't all Papists, sir," put in Vere.  "A little
+soldier spoke to me, saying he was a Methodist, and asking if there
+were any 'serious people' near.  I told him that Liddon was the prize
+serious town in England, and that it had a Methodist chapel called
+Noah's Ark, because only those who go to it can be saved.  I made him
+think I was 'serious', and he told me--Cousin Betty, you'll die of
+laughing when you hear--he, a private in the ranks, and Irish at
+that, preaches, yes preaches, in the streets, and in Methodist
+chapels when the regiment halts over Sunday near one.  He'll be
+trying to speak in Noah's Ark to-morrow."
+
+"Impossible," said Sir John angrily.  "Percy, do you know what Vere
+means?"
+
+"Very much what he says, sir.  The man is George Ferguson, north
+Irish, born in Derry.  He worked there in a muslin factory till a
+year ago, when the hard times caused by the war threw him out of
+work.  There was nothing to do anywhere, he had a young wife, and
+finding she would be taken on the strength of the regiment if he
+enlisted, he did so, to save them both from starving.  He is a strong
+Methodist, with a taste for preaching, and the regiment, who are
+nearly all Catholics, nick-named him the Swaddler Priest."
+
+"The what?" exclaimed Betty.
+
+"Swaddler, my dear.  The first Methodist preacher who went to Ireland
+in the days of Mr. Wesley, preached his first sermon on the text,
+'She brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling
+clothes', and Irish Methodists are always called Swaddlers."
+
+"And whenever did you become an authority on Methodism?" exclaimed
+Sir John.
+
+"Ferguson has been my servant, sir, and while I am an infidel myself,
+I find him interesting.  He can read and write, but he must have a
+hard life.  He probably thought that entering the ranks would only
+mean the irksomeness of a discipline he had never been accustomed to,
+and the possible dangers of war.  He didn't realize he would have to
+live in the closest companionship with men of, unfortunately, our
+lowest class, and their brutish tastes must hurt his self-respect.
+Yet I have never known him anything but serenely cheerful.  He not
+only keeps himself above his surroundings, but he does it as if the
+effort were enjoyable, and tries to preach somewhere each Sunday."
+
+"I should have thought it impossible for a north Irish Protestant to
+live in a south Irish regiment," commented Betty.
+
+"I don't usually know much of what happens in barracks," said Percy,
+"but I was told--not by Ferguson--that when we were in Dublin he
+joined some Methodists who were preaching on the streets, and they
+gave out he would speak in their chapel the next Sunday.  His
+comrades told him they would whip him if he did, but of course he
+went, and coming back, lay down on his cot and went to sleep quietly.
+No one disturbed him; the man who told me said they thought they
+might find themselves up against something bigger than they liked if
+they did.  I think that men of our people, no matter if they are
+unsaintly themselves, respect a saint.  Ferguson lives a strictly
+correct life, never touches drink, always does his duty, and is
+always cheerful and ready to do a kind act for a comrade."
+
+"What does the fellow preach about?" growled Sir John.
+
+"I heard him once speaking just outside the barracks to a crowd of
+soldiers and passers-by, and he spoke so strongly against swearing,
+that I refrain from profanity in his presence, fearing that he might
+think it his duty to reprove me if I did."
+
+"What's England coming to," shouted Sir John, "when a private soldier
+is allowed to set himself up as a teacher?  The end will be like when
+she let cobblers and tinkers usurp the place of ordained clergymen,
+and under that man whose name shall never be spoken in Haslem Towers
+while I live, dipped sacrilegious hands in the blood of her sainted
+king, Charles I.  And when you allow a man to go as far as this
+Ferguson does, Percy Haslem, you are a traitor to your king."
+
+"My dear uncle," said the unruffled Percy, "when Mr. Wesley began his
+work many thought as you do, but since then, the Supreme Being, or
+Fate, put a full stop to that period of the world's history by the
+French Revolution.  Now no one is sure when our dear lower classes
+may not demand our heads; but we are quite sure that we would rather
+have a revolution of Bible readers than of atheists, so we let men
+like Ferguson alone."
+
+* * *
+
+So Bee spent her first evening at Haslem Towers, and on the Sunday
+morning went with the family to the beautiful old parish church,
+which only lacked a preacher and congregation to make it a perfect
+place of worship, for in the pulpit a curate dashed through the
+magnificent liturgy, and the congregation was a handful of farmers
+and the Towers' servants.
+
+Bee sat in the great square pew trying to follow the service as she
+had learned to in York with Mrs. Edgar, while Betty lolled in a
+corner with a novel, and Vere was studying out a trick with a pack of
+cards.  Sir John worshipped by doing nothing whatever, and only
+Percy, good-humouredly, thinking Bee might feel alone, looked at his
+prayer book when he remembered it.
+
+In the afternoon Vere slipped off to the Methodist Sunday School,
+which he attended sometimes when his grandfather forgot to forbid it.
+He brought home the news that Ferguson had come to the school and
+been asked to speak, which he did so well, that it was announced he
+would preach that evening.  "I was with Ned," said Vere, "when one of
+the elders asked Ferguson.  Dr. Brown was there too; he looked odd in
+his drab coat and broad-brimmed hat by the soldier's scarlet.
+Ferguson seemed taken aback.  He said, 'How do you know that I am not
+an impostor?'  And the elder said directly, 'You would be the very
+first I ever met in the army; a hypocrite could never stand it there.
+He would be in torment indeed if he tried to wear a mask as a soldier
+among soldiers.'  Then Dr. Brown asked him to have a dish of tea with
+them.  Methodism is awfully upsetting.  Think of even a Quaker, who
+is a doctor, asking a private soldier, the lowest class of all, to
+sit down with his wife!"
+
+"Vere," said Betty, "you shall take me to this ridiculous Noah's Ark
+to-night.  I am dying to hear this Ferguson creature.  We will take
+Bee too, and Percy can come to keep us out of mischief."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+  The Man Who Preached in Noah's Ark, and
+  Some of His Hearers.
+
+Noah's Ark was a big, bare building, frigid in its lack of adornment
+or grace.  Two things only made it fit for a place of worship--one
+who preached and those who listened.  The woollen workers of Liddon
+with their drab-gowned, prim-bonneted women, filled the hard benches,
+women and young children on one side of the house, and men and boys
+on the other.  Percy and Vere were seated with Ned and the doctor,
+with Betty and Bee just across the broad aisle.  They were
+fashionably late, and the whole congregation were singing, without a
+touch of instrumental music to lead the hard strength of their
+voices--
+
+"Let the house of the Lord be filled with glory, Hallilujah."
+
+Three times they sang the line, their voices swelling in a harsh
+exaltation that was almost menacing.
+
+  "Let the preacher be filled with Thy love,
+    Hallilujah.
+  "Let the members be filled with Thy love,
+    Hallilujah".
+
+
+Ten verses in all they sang, each consisting of the triple repeating
+of one line.  Betty listened with the distaste of an educated music
+lover, yet she was oddly fascinated by the strength that showed in
+every note of the shouted hymn.  These Methodists hurled their joy
+and confidence in God like a gauntlet of defiance at some unseen foe,
+and Percy's blood tingled.  He recalled a morning on the hills of
+Spain, before the battle of Vimiero, when he had been with
+Wellington's army.  There was the same intense sense of many men held
+together for one thing, and swayed absolutely by one man's words; but
+here, both the Commander and Enemy of these Methodists were of the
+other world, and according to Percy's arid philosophy, probably did
+not exist.  He had fed his mind on Rousseau and Tom Paine, till he
+believed the miraculous and supernatural were scientifically
+impossible, and he felt irritated at the very tangible faith of these
+people in intangible possibilities.
+
+The congregation were seated again, and George Ferguson in his
+regimentals, a splash of scarlet in that hall of grays and drabs,
+stood at the preacher's desk.  He was a slightly built man, about
+twenty-four, and in no sense an orator, but he had a good voice and
+delivery, and believed so intensely in what he said that his simple
+words had a certain power.
+
+He was telling his own story--"I was born August 1, 1786, in Derry,
+Ireland.  My parents were respectable and in comfortable
+circumstances, but though members of the Church of England, had no
+knowledge of spiritual things.  I was allowed to follow my own
+inclination and became very wicked and profane.  The one exception to
+the godlessness round me was an aunt--a Methodist--who grieved at the
+way I was growing up, and would talk to me of my soul.  So I became
+anxious, fearing to lie down to sleep lest I should wake in hell.  I
+would lie awake groaning and sobbing, 'Oh, God, have mercy on me.'  I
+went whenever I could with my aunt to class meetings and preachings,
+and at one I wept openly, saying when spoken to--'I am so wicked.  I
+am not washed in the Blood, and I am afraid I shall be lost.  May God
+have mercy on me.'  The preacher and class prayed with me, and then
+he said, laying his hand on my head, 'George, you will yet go to
+preach the Gospel to sinners.'  So I obtained grace, and resolved to
+turn from my sinful manner of life, being then seven."
+
+The last words came as a shock to Percy, who wondered what kind of
+sinful life could be lived by a boy under seven in a respectable
+home.  But the congregation saw nothing incongruous in it; they
+shouted "Amens" and "Hallilujah" as the speaker paused, then
+listened, many groaning aloud as he went on to tell of his "fall from
+grace".  His parents moved from Derry into the country where there
+were no Methodists, and he drifted with other boys into attending
+cock-fights, and horse races on Sundays.  At sixteen he was bound out
+for three years to learn his trade at a muslin factory.  The hours
+there were long, and the work and confinement very hard to a boy
+accustomed to the indulgence of home.  "I felt like Israel in Egypt
+in bondage under taskmasters," he said quaintly, "but in my dungeon I
+saw the Cloud, the Pillar, the Rock, the quails and the manna that I
+had rejected, and I hungered for them.  I joined the Methodist
+Society as a probationer, I read the Bible daily on my knees, I
+retired for prayer seven times a day, I fasted entirely every Friday,
+and kept close watch over my words and conduct, hoping to find peace
+with God.  The persecutions of my shopmates were hot and heavy, but I
+was convinced I must be singular, I felt it was life or death--death
+to live after the flesh.  Mental distress and severe fasting reduced
+me to a skeleton, and my master kindly sent me home on a visit, but
+it was my soul that was suffering, I felt I had sinned beyond the
+mercy of God.  I was tempted to give up.  If God could not pardon me
+I had better know the worst of my case at once, by putting an end to
+my miserable life.  I took a rope to an old warehouse one night,
+fixed it to a beam, and made a noose."
+
+He paused dramatically, and his audience leaned forward with excited
+faces.  All the colour and passion that raised their lives from
+grayness was in the unseen world.  The excitement that outsiders
+sought in theatre and lurid novel, in war and gambling for high
+stakes, the early Methodist found in these soul-conflicts with the
+Enemy.
+
+In a wonderfully soft voice Ferguson continued, "As clear as if
+spoken I heard the words, 'Pray first'.  I instantly fell on my face,
+crying to God for Christ's sake to have mercy on me--on vile and
+wretched me.  In a moment the rock was smitten, and I rested on
+Christ.  I threw myself in the Blood of the Atonement crying--'Wash
+me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.'  In a
+moment hope took the place of despair.  I had peace with God.  I
+loved God above all things.  Christ was the altogether lovely."
+
+Ferguson's voice had risen to a shout, he stamped his feet and
+clapped his hands in an ecstasy, as his words rang above the tumult
+of the congregation, who were now jumping up and down in their seats,
+weeping, singing, shouting "Hallilujah", clapping their hands, while
+some fell on the floor where they lay rigid as if in a trance.  Betty
+half rose, then sat very still.  Bee was rather too astonished to be
+able to think, and Percy was studying Ferguson's face.  Its features
+showed the Scotch blood that is the backbone of Ulster, and a
+stainless life with much fasting and prayer, had given it an intense
+refinement.  There was as little sign of mental as of moral weakness
+in it.  Percy told himself the man was self-deluded; but in his heart
+he was not quite sure of it.
+
+The congregation quieted enough to hear the preacher again, and
+Ferguson resumed, "I returned to work a new creature.  I thought I
+was out of Babylon--that the Enemy had done with me; I expected this
+'time of singing birds' to last the whole year.  But the Enemy said
+to me, 'You are young, if you tell of this wonderful change people
+will not believe you.  Keep it to yourself till you see if you can
+hold out.  If you don't you may hurt the cause of God'.  So--
+
+  'I was brought into thrall, I was stript of
+    my all,
+  I was banished from Jesu's face.'"
+
+
+The audience intent on every phase of this soul-drama, groaned deeply
+as they swayed to and fro in their seats, and Ferguson lingered over
+the details of his next three months of mental agony.  "But on June
+11, 1805, I secured peace at last.  Though I was in the shop I began
+at once to praise God aloud, and my shop mates said, 'The matter is
+decided at last, George is quite crazy.'"
+
+Again the joyful tumult rose, and Percy felt irritated.  He lived
+above the low moral standards of his day, and he thought it
+preposterous to preach that nothing saved a man but this converting.
+How could Ferguson with his intelligence believe that without
+salvation he was as low in the sight of God, as the vilest man on
+earth?  Then he looked at the boys by him.  Ferguson and the elders
+were shouting Bible promises above the "blessed disorder", and urging
+penitents to come forward.  Ned, white-faced, and trembling with
+excitement, but with determination in his eyes, rose and held out his
+hand to Vere.  Percy saw in his cousin's face a reflection of the
+whirl of feeling round him, and had a vision of himself breaking the
+news to Sir John that the heir of the Haslems had knelt at a
+Methodist penitent bench.  Then he wondered if this mad religion
+might not give Vere the moral strength he knew he needed.  On the
+spur of that thought, he whispered to the wavering boy, "Ferguson's a
+straight man, if you believe what he says, go forward."
+
+But Ned went up alone.  All that was good in Vere clung to Ned, and
+whatever sense of peace and strength he knew, he had met only in Dr.
+Brown's home, but he felt he could not face his grandfather's anger,
+nor give up in a moment his habits of idleness, and his drifting into
+doubtful pleasures rather than seeking them.
+
+After the meeting the boys stood together, Ned quivering with the
+thought that he had pledged every fibre of his strong young body
+forever to the service of the Lord who had died for him.  Vere said
+eagerly, "I feel as you do, Ned, but I can't go forward.  If you were
+in my place--if my grandfather were yours, you would keep your
+religion to yourself for a little while."
+
+And Ned, as was his habit, excused Vere and believed him.  So the
+boys parted, Ned joining his grandfather who pressed five guineas
+into Ferguson's hand, as he bade him good-bye, saying, "If ever thee
+passes this way again, George, remember my house is also the home of
+all weary pilgrims on the road to Canaan, no matter what the colour
+of their coats may be."
+
+The young soldier listened with bowed head, until he went off, and it
+was six months later that a messenger brought Dr. Brown and Ned a
+thick letter from Battle Barracks, Sussex, where Ferguson's regiment
+was quartered.  Ned's letter was mainly advice to young Christians,
+mixed with bits of the writer's experiences.  "In a crowded, noisy
+room," Ferguson wrote, "I have learnt the secret of lying on my cot
+so shut away in spirit from my surroundings, that I can hear the
+voices that speak to my soul as distinct as if I was in a solitude."
+
+Ned was walking just outside the town as he read the letter, and then
+he met Vere, who exclaimed excitedly, "Glorious news, Ned!  Sir
+John's going to get me a commission as soon as I'm sixteen--next
+month, and I'll be off to see life in his Majesty's service."
+
+In spite of his up-bringing in a Quaker home Ned felt half-envious of
+his friend's future, and Vere went on impulsively.  "What are you
+going to be, Ned?  You don't want to spend your life taking pills to
+old women.  Of course you couldn't expect your grandfather to help
+you to be a soldier, yet it's the only life for a gentleman.  Why
+don't you write to your father and tell him you want to enter the
+army like me?  That little cat, Bee, talks as if he was quite well
+off--almost a gentleman."
+
+Ned did not answer, he really knew nothing of his father.  Certainly
+very interesting and valuable presents came to him every year on his
+birthday, from far-off York, where Mr. Edgar lived with the second
+wife he had married and her three little boys; but he seemed to have
+given his eldest son entirely up to his grandfather.
+
+So Vere went away, but Ned was far too loyal to his grandfather to
+ever think of appealing to an unknown father against him.
+Nevertheless, now that Vere's departure had broken off all his
+connection with Haslem Towers, he began to feel that life at Liddon
+was very dull.  He saw Bee sometimes when she rode out with Betty;
+she was growing up into a tall girl, but she still smiled at him with
+a child's frank friendship.  Betty decidedly refused to forbid this
+very slight intercourse, when Sir John grumbled at it, so he said no
+more, for Bee had grown very dear to him.  He was content to give her
+her own way in calling herself by her father's name, but he was
+resolved that some day she should marry her cousin, Vere, and be
+mistress of Haslem Towers.  Her refinement of spirit and high
+courage, he thought, might save the unhappy boy, who in the
+temptations of an idle garrison life was showing many signs of moral
+and mental weakness; Sir John refused to believe the worst.  "Boys
+will be boys," he said impatiently to Betty.  "Of course I'll pay his
+debts again, and ask no questions; if he sows all his wild oats now,
+he'll make all the better husband for our little maid later.  She'll
+steady him fast enough, never fear--Bee Goode, as the minx insists on
+calling herself, not bad, eh!  She shall be his wife on the day he is
+twenty-one, and she will be seventeen."
+
+Betty felt a womanly reluctance to think of Bee thus sacrificed, yet
+she went on helping to train Bee in the ignorance of life that should
+make her unable to resist when those she loved and trusted pushed her
+skilfully into marriage.  Betty, though a good woman, was warped by
+the artificial world in which she lived; she knew that Bee's parents
+had left her nothing; her brother, Eli, five years older, was with
+relatives in Boston, but Bee, when seven, had been adopted by the
+Edgars, who had given her up unwillingly to Sir John.  Betty could
+not imagine any lot for a girl but marriage; and surely, she honestly
+believed, luxury in England, even with the lowest of husbands, was
+better than exile in some howling wilderness.
+
+Bee had not forgotten her American brother, or her Canadian friends,
+but she never heard from either, and she believed Sir John when he
+blamed French privateers for the destruction of the Atlantic mail.
+She still wrote sometimes, but as none of her letters went overseas,
+her friends there naturally thought she had forgotten them in English
+luxury.  Vere, who knew his grandfather's plan, hated Bee with all
+his mean little soul, but never dreamed of refusing to obey; and Bee,
+who had not the faintest idea that she was destined by her kin to be
+her cousin's wife, still despised him.  Conditions of thought round
+her, however, were gradually bringing her to feel that it was the
+bounden duty of the relatives of the heir of Haslem Towers to make
+any sacrifice to save him.
+
+In the big world outside Liddon much was happening.  England, with
+her industries crippled, her commerce half-strangled, and seeing the
+carrying trade slipping into American hands, passed the unfortunate
+Orders-in-Council proclaiming any ship that did not touch an English
+port the lawful prey of her men-of-war.  The answer of the United
+States was an immediate threat of war, should the order not be
+rescinded.  England, fearing to lose Canada, whom she could not then
+defend--she did not imagine that Canada could defend
+herself--rescinded the orders, all of which did not prevent the
+States from declaring war on June 18, 1812.
+
+The post that brought the news to Liddon also brought a letter for
+Ned from his father--"Upper Canada will be invaded before this
+reaches you," Edgar wrote.  "We have a population of 70,000--both the
+Canadas have only 225,000, against the eight millions of the States,
+but we mean to keep the old flag flying.  We have 1,500 miles of
+frontier to defend, and only 4,000 English regulars to help us do it.
+We have appointed our Governor, General Isaac Brock, as Commander,
+and are calling out every man between eighteen and forty-five.  I am
+going, and I began this letter meaning to command you, as my son, to
+start for Canada at once, and add one more man to our little army.
+My friend, Surgeon Tam, at the Isle of Wight, would arrange for your
+passage out.  You may refuse to obey me; I know you belong to a
+religion that teaches a man that he can enjoy the protection of the
+laws of a country, and grow rich there, but he must not fight in its
+battles.  It is a 'sin' for him to go to war, but quite right to
+accept the safe living that other men are dying to defend.  I cannot
+compel you to obey me, but, oh my son, won't you give up your
+religion and come to be my comrade?  I have a wife, whom you would
+love if you knew her, and three little boys; won't you be near to
+give them a protection if I fall?  No one can doubt the righteousness
+of our cause.  I don't deny England has often sinned and blundered,
+but no land on earth has sinned and blundered so seldom as she, and
+her flag is the only one that shall ever wave over Canada--so help
+us, God!  The American people have been excited by exaggerated
+stories of England's claiming the right to search their ships for
+deserters from her navy, but the President and Congress wish to take
+our country--our Canada.  Will you come to be a soldier, to help me,
+your father?; or is your honour less to you than this Methodist
+salvation?"
+
+Silently Ned laid the letter before his grandfather; the Quaker
+doctor read it, looked at the boy keenly, and said quietly--"Thee
+means to go, I see, but what of giving up thy faith?"
+
+"Grandfather, I am a Methodist, not a Friend.  I know some of our
+people think with you about war, but others are like Ferguson, whom
+you call a good man.  I must go, to show my father that I can; I must
+keep my religion, yet fight bravely beside him.  Don't you think I
+ought to go?  Don't you think Canada is in the right?"
+
+The Quaker looked at him wistfully.  Ned was nineteen, and careful
+rearing, and the habits of self-discipline that his rigid faith
+taught him, had given both his body and mind the strength of tempered
+steel.  Dr. Brown had planned he should be a healer of wounds and a
+saver of life, like himself, and now all this splendid young manhood
+must be offered to the Moloch of war.  But he said--"In many ways I
+admire thy father, but he is over-hasty in judgment; yet I am free to
+think he does right in fighting in this war, and certainly thee must
+go as he says.  I know thee will never forsake the rules of thy
+faith."
+
+* * *
+
+Ned, wandering off by himself to say good-bye to his old life, was
+amazed, in his loneliness, to find Bee.  She also was alone; sitting
+on a stone, in tears.
+
+"Miss Bee," exclaimed Ned, "Are you hurt?  What is the matter?"
+
+[Illustration: "Miss Bee," exclaimed Ned, "are you hurt?  What is the
+matter?"]
+
+She stood up; a tall slender girl in a purple serge riding habit and
+a plumed hat; not a beauty, but fast developing into a woman who
+would have the elusive flaire of charm.  "I came out here by
+myself--ran away in fact," she said impulsively.  "I could not bear
+servants or friends or anyone near me--I had to cry alone.  You are a
+Friend; why isn't everybody like you?  Why do they make these awful
+wars?  Do you know that Sir John has got the War Office to take him
+off the retired list and he is going to Canada, and Vere with him?
+And we think Cousin Percy is going too, and he will take Betty and
+me.  They are going to fight, and Eli, my brother, I know, will fight
+too, on the other side; it is the most miserable war that ever was."
+
+"Perhaps your brother won't want to fight," said Ned trying to
+comfort her.  "I should think many Americans would see they were in
+the wrong--."
+
+"You know nothing about it," she interrupted with flashing eyes.  "We
+only hear one side here, but I know there is another.  Sir John and
+Cousin Betty would be so angry if I said such a thing at home, and I
+love them--and I love Eli too."  Under her breath she added, "and I
+am an American."
+
+She stopped, suddenly realizing her impulsiveness in confiding in a
+young man who was almost a stranger.  "But he is one of those odd
+people," she thought, "who think women should preach, and rule, just
+like men; and that a man mustn't do anything that a woman shouldn't."
+So much Bee had heard, and she thought Ned's ideas must be foolish,
+and rather improper, but interesting.  Ned said nothing, but caught
+her horse, which was grazing near.
+
+"Thank you," she said, rather shyly as she mounted, "for listening to
+me.  I feel better now."
+
+She galloped off, and Ned looked after her--"What an odd girl," he
+thought.  "But she is rather interesting."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+A Voyage to Canada in 1812.
+
+The Isle of Wight with its white chalk cliffs, and the semi-tropical
+vegetation of its valleys, is a paradise among islands; though in
+August, 1812, when Ned landed there and was met by Ferguson, the
+babel of screams and howled curses he heard made him think of an
+inferno.
+
+Ned had parted with his grandfather at Southampton, where the
+Surgeon, Dr. Tam, a bluff Scot, looked him over, and told him shortly
+that he was to go out, forward, on the troop ship "Lightfoot", with
+eight hundred men, which was all that England could spare to send
+Canada--and General Brock had said that ten thousand was the smallest
+number with which he could possibly defend the brave colony.
+
+Ned was too delighted that Ferguson was one of the eight hundred to
+mind anything else, but he looked at his friend startled, as they
+came into the deep water harbor of Ryde, and heard the sound of women
+shrieking as if death itself had gripped them.  Ferguson's face
+paled, "God pity them," he said.  "Only a few women can go with the
+regiment to Canada.  They have been chosen by lot--my wife by the
+good providence of God drawing a full number--and you can hear the
+ones who drew blanks."
+
+They went on board H.M.S. "Lightfoot", a fine bit of the "wooden
+walls of old England."  There, all seemed confusion.  The Irish
+womens' screams were heart-rending as they were, as gently as
+possible, forced back on shore.  Ned was glad to follow Ferguson
+below, first to the cramped "married quarters", where he was
+introduced to a neat, quiet little woman with a baby--Mrs. Ferguson.
+Opening off this smaller cabin was a wide space "between decks",
+where the men's hammocks were hung so close, that a man who left one
+when they were all slung would have to perform an acrobatic feat to
+get out, and dress on his knees on the floor under them.
+
+As Ferguson showed Ned how to sling his hammock, and told him what he
+would have to do, rough voices round them called mockingly on the
+"Swaddler".  Ferguson took no notice until big, brown-faced Dr. Tam,
+in his uniform, appeared beside him.  He nodded curtly to Ned, and
+said gruffly to Ferguson--"Ye'll have to keep your Swaddling talk to
+yourself this trip, man.  We are going to have some trouble with this
+crowd--they're Papists, too, and we can't have any religious fights.
+So you see you keep your mouth shut.  Our new colonel hasn't any use
+for preaching soldiers."
+
+Ned was too bewildered by the astounding unexpectedness of his new
+surroundings to be able to think clearly for the moment, but Dr. Tam
+shrugged his shoulders as he went aft to his quarters; Edgar was his
+friend, and Edgar had insisted that Ned should be sent out with the
+men of this regiment.  "The best of them," growled Dr. Tam to
+himself, "are Irish rebels whom England doesn't dare to send to the
+Continent, for fear they might go over to the French.  As to the
+worst of them, the regiments that threw them out weren't saints, but
+there are a few things that a man can't stand, and keep the least
+scrap of decency.  And to think of that boy, who is as innocent as a
+girl, being compelled to live among them for a month!  But it's his
+own father's doing, and I suppose it was the only thing to do."
+
+Dr. Tam was a friend of Edgar's, and like him believed that a man
+whose religion condemned war must be a coward; and when he also held
+remarkable views on the equality of women, it showed he was
+effeminate.  It was to cure Ned of his supposed weaknesses in one
+rough lesson, that he was reconciled to his making the voyage as he
+did.
+
+Ned, who had the cheerful temper that goes with perfect health,
+decided that his new companions would probably improve when he got to
+know them better, and in any case he had a good comrade in Ferguson,
+so he stayed on deck, enjoying the novelty of everything.
+
+By now everything was in perfect order.  Screaming women and howling
+men had been put out of hearing and sight before the captain and the
+officers' ladies who were cabin passengers, came on board.  Ned saw
+Chloe's broad black face, a good foil for the patrician loveliness of
+Betty beside her; Bee was with them, and Ned thought--"Vere's as ass
+to call her ugly, or even plain; she's not a beauty like Mrs. Haslem,
+but she's sparkling, and radiant.  When she's grown up no one will
+call her plain."
+
+Then Ned saw some one in whom he was more interested than in any
+girl--Vere, with whom he still corresponded, and whom he still liked;
+for all that was good in Vere showed itself when he wrote to or met
+Ned; he valued Ned's good opinion more than any one's, and if any
+influence could ever save Vere, from himself, it would be the quiet
+strength of young Ned Edgar.
+
+Vere saw Ned at last, and went to him amazed--"What on earth are you
+doing here?" he exclaimed.
+
+Ned explained, and though the sudden coldness with which Vere turned
+away hurt him a little, he was not surprised, nor much disappointed
+in his friend, for he understood that now less than ever, among his
+present companions, would Vere be able to meet him openly as a friend.
+
+* * *
+
+They were off now.  At a word, sail after sail had unfurled, and
+beautiful under her enormous spread of white canvas, the "Lightfoot"
+"trod the waters like a thing of life."  Ned was fascinated at this
+manifestation of drilled power.  Every man on the ship had moved as a
+part of one great machine, and his imagination took fire.  It seemed
+audacious that men should show such strength.
+
+Ferguson seemed to have guessed his thoughts, for later when the
+shores of England were fading from view, he said--"Look ahead now,
+Ned."
+
+Behind them the sun was shining, but before them the Atlantic rolled,
+a mighty heaving waste of gray waves, under a heavy sky piled with
+lowering storm clouds.  A heaved-up ridge of water caught the
+"Lightfoot", she rose on its height, and slid down as it passed--a
+plaything of the sullen sea.  Suddenly she seemed small to Ned, a
+winged insect fluttering in the grasp of the terrible ocean.
+
+"The sea is His, He made it," cried Ferguson in mingled awe and
+exaltation, "I am afraid when I think of His infinite power, yet this
+awful God is mine--my Lord and my Lover," and his voice sank to a
+thrilling softness as he said the last word.
+
+By night Ned had forgotten Ferguson and everything.  With most of the
+unhappy soldiers he was horribly seasick, faintly wishing that some
+enemy might in charity sink the "Lightfoot" with all on board her.
+Even this, however, finally passed.  He felt an interest in living
+once more and even in eating again.  A few men, Ferguson among them,
+remained sick and stayed so all the voyage, crawling shakily about
+when the sea was very smooth, and collapsing at a hint of rough
+weather.
+
+Every morning each man received his rations for the day, cooked
+meat--salt beef or pork--pease-pudding, some rice or porridge, sea
+biscuits, a little sugar and butter, a pint of hot cocoa, some rum,
+and three quarts of drinking water.  The fare was coarse, but it was
+wholesome and abundant, and Ned enjoyed it.
+
+Sells, a ruffianly looking man whose hammock hung next to his, swore
+at everything.
+
+"Dog's food, that's what it is," he growled, "And do you know what
+they're eating aft?  Every morning there's a dish of chocolate or
+coffee, with cakes and biscuits, and all the butter they like.  Then
+biscuit and cheese at noon, and a high class dinner at night with
+fresh fowls and meat--they've live sheep, and pigs, and chickens on
+board for themselves--and potatoes, and pickles, and plum-pudding,
+with porter and wine.  Then they have a supper of coffee and cake,
+and preserves, and more wine.  Curses on all rich, I say."
+
+He closed with a stream of profanity which brought Ferguson, pale and
+shaken, to his feet with a stern--"Thou shalt not take the Name of
+the Lord thy God in vain."
+
+With an ugly oath Sells knocked him down, and Ned sprang to his
+assistance, for mal-de-mer had left Ferguson too weak to defend
+himself, and Sells was beating him savagely.  The crowding men round
+them, cursing all "Swaddling interferers", struck at the two
+Methodists, yelling the war cries of persecuted, bitter, Papist
+Ireland.  Ferguson and Ned were only saved from serious injury by the
+prompt interference of the sergeants, who, however, told Ferguson
+that the next time he "preached" and caused a riot they would report
+him.
+
+His bruises, and anxiety as to Ferguson, kept the boy awake for some
+time that night.  When he slept, at last, he was almost immediately
+awakened by a confusion of frightful sounds.  The shriek of the winds
+and the pounding of the sea showed that "no small tempest was upon
+them."  Frantic voices cried that a mast, or spar, had fallen, that
+the captain was killed, the boats were all swept away, and that the
+ship was sinking.  Eight hundred fear-crazed men, with a score of
+women, all penned in the pitchy dark, under fastened hatches,
+screamed, cursed, and called on the saints, while the ship seemed to
+roll nearly over, and Ned shuddered as he clung to his hammock and
+tried to pray.  Then through a lull in the tumult he heard a woman
+singing--
+
+  "Jesus, Lover of my soul, let me to Thy
+    bosom fly,
+  While the nearer waters roll, whilst the
+    tempest still is high."
+
+
+"It's the Swaddler's wife," Ned heard Tim Kelly, an ignorant Irish
+giant, groan, "Sure, it's hitting him has brought this on us.  A man
+that hits a woman or a priest never has no luck.  Mary! save us all,
+we're going now.  Boys, ask the Swaddler to pray.  Sure, a heretic
+priest, if he's a good living man, is better than none, when it comes
+to dying."
+
+A hundred voices called to Ferguson, and men were silent, while
+between the roars of the wind the Methodist spoke, the perfect
+calmness of his voice reassuring the terrified people.  Bit by bit he
+shouted the story of the Man who walked on the sea of Galilee, and
+who slept in its wildest storm, only waking at the prayer of His
+frightened companions, to still winds and waves with a word.
+
+"The "Lightfoot" weathered the storm--thanks to Ferguson's prayers,
+Kelly and his mates believed, and they treated him with the rough
+respect which the south Irishman, lovable and unreasonable,
+superstitious and chivalrous, gives to his women and priests.  They
+tried not to swear in his presence, and took his reproofs meekly when
+they forgot themselves.  Sells and the few like him who were really
+thorough blackguards dared not say a word.
+
+"You see, Ned," said Ferguson, "how God can change the lion into a
+lamb, and cause enemies to become friends."
+
+Ned smiled, thinking--"The old Greeks were right when they said the
+gods help those who help themselves."
+
+There was now a dead calm.  For several days the "Lightfoot" lay idle
+on the sea.  The soldiers' rations were reduced, and as the calm
+continued, reduced again.  The drinking water became unspeakably
+foul.  It was a time of considerable anxiety for the officers--eight
+hundred men, illiterate and coarse-minded, the class that thinks most
+of what it eats, were now only half fed.  Every hour they looked for
+trouble, ready to meet it with the utmost severity--yet it did not
+come.
+
+"I don't understand," said the colonel over his wine after dinner.
+"Here's a mob of Irish recruits who are probably all rebels in their
+hearts, and a few score English blackguards.  What's making them
+behave?"
+
+"A Swaddler named Ferguson from Ulster, I think, sir," said Dr. Tam.
+"In some utterly incomprehensible way he has managed to mesmerize a
+crowd of south Irish into imagining he is a priest.  He is suffering
+still with sea-sickness, and he lives on air and saying prayers, but
+he is always cheerful, makes jokes on his own privations, and is so
+tactful with his religious talk, that the men are ashamed to complain
+before him."
+
+"Hum, I don't believe in Methodists and these preaching soldiers, but
+this seems to be an exceptional case.  But why isn't he in hospital
+having proper food, if he is as sick as you say?"
+
+"I wanted him to go, sir, but he didn't."
+
+"Are you in the habit, Doctor, of letting your patients decide
+whether they shall obey your orders or not?"
+
+"As you said, sir, Ferguson is an exceptional case.  Under the
+circumstances I thought it best to let him have his way."
+
+"Hum, yes, but we can't have a man like him sacrificed to keep a
+rabble in order.  I'll go and see him myself."
+
+So the colonel stood with Percy and Dr. Tam by the Methodist's
+hammock.  Ferguson was too weak to rise, but he answered the
+colonel's inquiries very cheerfully--"Thank you, sir, but I have
+everything I need and more.  I don't have to depend on food to
+sustain me while I have the Book which says 'man shall not live by
+bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from God'."
+
+"Er, that is, of course the Bible is a very good book," blurted the
+Colonel, somewhat at a loss, "but if you require anything, mind and
+let the doctor know."
+
+As they returned to the deck he said abruptly--"What's that man's
+record before he joined us?  What's he doing in the ranks after three
+years service?"
+
+"His record's all right, sir," answered Percy, "but he is a Methodist
+first and a soldier afterwards.  He has spent the bulk of his time as
+an officer's servant, preferring that to being a sergeant, as it
+gives him more liberty and more time, to go out and preach."
+
+"And suppose I object to this regiment being made a convenience for
+the Methodist itinerancy?"
+
+"Seeing the Methodist itinerancy in the shape of Ferguson is being a
+great convenience to us, sir, I don't see the reason for your
+objection."
+
+"Well, well, we will see.  Doctor, don't let that man starve himself
+outright, while he is shaming the others into not complaining."
+
+Then the welcome wind came, rations were increased, and on September
+17, Ned saw Canada--Halifax, with the deep green of the all-embracing
+forest round her, and the vivid scarlet of the British flag still
+above her forts.
+
+The regiment with its officers, and the soldiers' wives were packed
+on the "Herald", a little 70-gun warship.  They sailed up a mile-wide
+river, Ned straining his eyes to see a line of distant hills clothed
+with the same unbroken forest.  Then the hills were blotted out by
+dark driving clouds, and sheets of rain.  The waves rose, and the
+"Herald" plunged through a night of storm and great discomfort to all
+on board.  Sunshine came with the morning, but the ship stopped off a
+rocky mountainous spot, with no sign of human habitation.  Orders
+were given, the men took their arms and knapsacks, the women their
+children, and all were landed with much difficulty.
+
+There was no sign of a road anywhere.  They climbed a rugged slope
+only to descend on its further side, and find another and steeper one
+before them, many of the men having to get up the worst places on
+their hands and knees.  Mrs. Ferguson was being helped by Dr. Tam,
+and Ned took her child on his back as they scrambled up the second
+hill and slipped down it into a wide deep bog.
+
+"Sure, and I don't see why we don't present this country to the
+Yankees as a gift," grumbled Tim Kelly.  "It's not fit for a decent
+Christian to live in.  I don't wonder it hasn't any people.  Murder!
+there's my shoe gone, and I daren't swear with the little Swaddler so
+near."
+
+"Forward," said a voice, and with demoralized ranks the regiment
+crawled out of the mud, leaving many more shoes behind it.  Night
+came, but there was no halt till it seemed to Ned that he had spent
+weeks falling over bushes and into creeks.  At last, however, the
+worn-out men were allowed to rest, and soon forgot their fatigues as
+they ate their suppers round huge fires of logs, and then bivouaced
+by them.
+
+"I wonder where we are, and if the enemy is anywhere near?" said Ned
+as he lay down by Ferguson, "I guess you are pretty done up."
+
+"I certainly feel the need of being under the grace of God," said the
+Methodist, "to lay the rough path of my peevish nature even, and open
+in my heart a constant Heaven."
+
+The next day they marched back to the ship, and soon reached Quebec,
+the excursion being an official idea to "break-in" fresh troops to
+campaigning in Canada.  The fortress city on the cliff with the many
+priests in her streets, and French spoken everywhere, seemed very
+foreign to Ned.
+
+"I thought Canada was English," Ferguson said to him as they went out
+together.
+
+"And so she is, stranger," said a fine looking man, who after
+watching them closely, stepped up beside them.  His speech and
+manners showed education, though he wore a hunting shirt of buckskin,
+and blue cloth trousers with fringes on the seams.  A skin cap,
+beaded moccasins, and a silver-handled hunting knife in his belt
+completed his costume.  He went on talking in the same frankly
+friendly manner, telling of the first invasion of Canada, across the
+Detroit River, by General Hull, with twenty-five hundred American
+troops.
+
+"He sent us a proclamation--'To the People of Canada'--telling them
+to choose between the 'peace, liberty, and security' he'd give them
+if they'd hurry in and be annexed, and the 'war, slavery, and
+destruction' they'd get if they didn't.'  Canada didn't seem to want
+his 'peace and liberty', especially after he had given us a sample of
+them by raiding on the Canadian side.  Then Brock left York with
+three hundred regulars, four hundred militia, and five guns, and near
+Detroit he met Tecumseh with seven hundred Shawanese."
+
+"Excuse me," said Ned, "but we don't know who these people are."
+
+"The Ohio river Indians--they've been scrapping with the Yankees all
+along, and Tecumseh, their chief, thought if we were fighting them
+too they might as well join hands with us."
+
+"I've heard of the Ojibways and Mohawks," said Ned.  "My father is a
+trader in York, and he wrote me that Upper Canada would raise six
+thousand militia, and her Indians could send in four thousand men as
+well."
+
+"Canadian Indians are all right," said their friend.  "They're under
+our government and laws, but Indians don't fight like white men, and
+as the Shawanese are only our allies, we mayn't always be able to
+control them.  But it will be all right as long as Brock's at the
+head of things.  On August 15, with only fourteen hundred men, half
+of them Indians, he moved to attack Detroit, and Hull with
+twenty-five hundred in a strong fort, capitulated."
+
+"He was a coward," exclaimed Ned.
+
+"Not so fast, son.  He had Detroit with its women and children to
+think of.  He knew what it would mean if it was stormed by Indians.
+In his place I'd have surrendered to any decent white man."
+
+"Well, that's one victory for us," said Ned.
+
+"We would have had more, but Sir George Prevost, the
+Governor-General, made an armistice with the Yankees.  He hoped to
+make peace, but they wouldn't meet him, and only used the time to arm
+their ships on the lakes.  And now, I suppose I may introduce myself,
+I'm James Edgar, of York, and I'm down here to meet Ned, my son."
+
+* * *
+
+After a joyous greeting, Ned was hurried off by Edgar to the little
+steamer "Accommodation", the first of her kind on Canadian waters.
+For nineteen shillings she took them to Montreal, giving them food,
+and letting them "berth" with their blankets among her piles of
+freight.  At Montreal a score of bateaux--broad, heavily-built
+boats--were waiting, and Ned was surprised to find his father in
+command of the Indians and white men in buckskin shirts who manned
+them.  They were loaded with ammunition, and meant to run the
+gauntlet of the guard the Americans kept on the river between
+Montreal and Kingston, blockading Upper Canada--now Ontario.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+How Ned Came to York (Toronto).
+
+Ned was standing, nervously alert, his hands gripping the long rifle
+that still seemed strange to them.  Before him was a strip of water,
+and all round him was forest--the gorgeous colored autumn trees of
+the Thousand Islands.  The Canadians were travelling by night and
+hiding by day, for the two American warships that kept the lake sent
+their boats out searching constantly.  Ned had been set as sentry by
+Tahata, the Mohawk, who was Edgar's lieutenant, and he was very
+afraid of failing to see some one of the little things which are
+important on watch duty.
+
+He stared at a boulder jutting out in the shallow water.  A minute
+ago bushes had screened its shore side, now they were certainly
+further along.  With a remembering of the trees that marched to
+Macbeth's castle, Ned gave the bird call Tahata had taught him for an
+alarm, and instantly two lithe brown men appeared at his side.  The
+suspected bushes stirred, showing part of a deerskin clad man, and
+all the Indians' alert savagery vanished.  Muttering, "It is Kaanah,"
+Edgar's Indian name, they lounged back to their places.
+
+Edgar stood up, taking the branches out of the loops in his garments,
+and walking lightly, he passed Ned with a smile, and came to Tahata.
+"The Long Knives' (Americans) ship has passed," he said.  "We will go
+on at dark.  And what of the boy?"
+
+"He has lived with men who did not know how to see," answered the
+Indian, "but he will learn, for he does not make the same mistake
+twice."
+
+"I wanted to see if you would notice me," said Edgar to Ned later.
+"I did not think you would be so quick."
+
+There was pride and affection in his voice, and Ned almost worshipped
+the father who, a few weeks before, had been a stranger to him.  So
+they journeyed on, escaping a hundred dangers through Edgar's careful
+leadership, for he was indeed just such a man as would be a hero to
+any boy; and finally reached Kingston with their cargo--Kingston with
+all her flags drooping at half-mast.
+
+Edgar hailed a red-headed young man on the deck of a smart
+schooner--the "Susan".  "What's happened, Archy?" he called.
+
+"Pretty bad news, Mr. Edgar.  Them blamed Yankees got across Niagara
+river before daylight on October thirteenth.  While our boys were
+beating them off at Queenston, a lot more sneaked up the mountain,
+took our battery there, and dug themselves some real smart trenches,
+then fired down on us.  The York 'Gazette' said they were 'villainous
+aggressors', and there were a thousand of them."
+
+"You red-headed blockhead," shouted Edgar.  "Do you mean to say we're
+half-masting our flags because we're invaded?"
+
+"Now don't get mad, Mr. Edgar," said the imperturbable Archy.  "We're
+not invaded.  General Brock started up to rout them out, but the
+firing was too hot.  It's durned difficult to run up a mountain with
+sharpshooters firing at you from behind logs and earthworks.  He went
+back, but only to try the other side with a lot of redcoats.  He
+passed our boys, and he said, 'Forward, York Volunteers', and you can
+bet them volunteers did go forward."
+
+"I see," said Edgar with sarcastic resignation.  "We won Queenston
+Heights, and then put all our flags at half-mast."
+
+"I meant, Mr. Edgar, that General Brock was shot dead as they charged
+the second time, and the boys had to go back.  That's why the Yankees
+are calling it their victory, though General Sheaffe took command.
+He had fifteen hundred men, half of them Mohawk Indians, and they
+went up the heights in three parties, and smashed the Yankee lines.
+The 'Gazette' said 'Our unprincipled neighbours were totally
+defeated', but we hereabouts are only thinking that General Brock is
+dead."
+
+* * *
+
+So Ned heard the story of Queenston Heights, a fight which the
+American histories record as a "frontier skirmish of no importance
+but on the whole in favour of the Americans," while Canada lauds it
+as her great victory, on each 13th of October raising the flags on
+her schools and telling her children how Brock died.  His ringing
+last command, Toronto has taken as her watchword--"Forward, York
+Volunteers!"
+
+And in reality, the American invasion was little more than a
+reconnoitre--a test of the strength of the enemy, and its repulse was
+nothing in comparison to Canada's loss in Brock's death at that time.
+Yet we do well to count it a victory, for that tall granite
+shaft--Brock's monument on Queenston Heights--overlooking the gorge
+of wild Niagara, is Canada's declaration of independence.  When our
+gray-coated militia charged up the heights beside the scarlet-clad
+English regulars, we affirmed that this North American continent was
+large enough for the growth of two nations and the flying of two
+flags.
+
+Edgar and his party went on board the "Susan", and Ned was surprised
+again to find his father here also in command.  The voyage had its
+excitements, as Archy explained to Ned.  "Them blamed Yankees have
+ships all over the lake.  We have some too, but we haven't, and can't
+get, a gun heavier than twelve and eighteen pounders, while theirs
+are twenty-four and thirty-two pounders, which means they can send a
+heap heavier shot.  I was captured with the 'Susan', going to
+Kingston this time."
+
+"How did you get away?" said Ned, hoping for a story.
+
+"I left Niagara just after the battle to run to Kingston, to meet
+you, and to take General Brock's papers and stuff there.  There was a
+bit of a blow, and the 'Susan' was caught inshore with a Yankee
+waiting to blow us out of the water as we came 'round.  Course, I
+surrendered.  Says the Yankee.  'What ship's that, and what's your
+lading?'  Says I, 'Susan', Niagara to Kingston, with General Brock's
+papers and things'.  'Pass,' says the Yankee, 'General Brock was all
+right, and I'm real sorry he's dead'.  And he dipped his flag to me.
+That Yankee was a gentleman and I've known others like him.  I don't
+like this having to fight with them."
+
+"But you wouldn't let them take Canada?"
+
+"No, sir, you can bet your sweet life that Canada won't let no Yankee
+boss her into changing her flag.  They're too blamed interfering, and
+old Upper Canada'll fight while she's got a man left to hold a gun.
+Maybe they'll remember not to come in here again.  That's York."
+
+Ned saw a narrow peninsula, curving round to form the harbor.  It was
+the promontory that has since become Toronto Island.  The entrance
+was on the west, between Gibraltar Point (Hanlan's), with its
+lighthouse and blockhouses, and on the mainland, Fort Toronto, and
+Western Battery.  These consisted of earthworks and massive log
+barracks, armed with a few small cannon, where the present fort now
+stands.
+
+The "Susan" sailed past the forts down a placid sheet of water.  On
+the right Ned looked across the low sandbanks of the peninsula to the
+lake stretching away to the horizon.  On the left was open ground
+where cows grazed, and beyond, the long wall of the forest.  Then
+they were abreast of Half-moon Battery (Bathurst Street), where stood
+the Governor's "Palace", a big log house in the form of a half
+square, with verandahs round its inner sides, and a garden shaded by
+stately oaks.  There too were the quarters, with their magazines and
+storehouses.
+
+Then came more pasture and the "Susan" stopped at the wharves, (John
+Street) east of which lay the little town of York, with its nine
+hundred population, and three straggling streets--Palace Street
+(Front), which had houses only on its north side; King Street, and
+Lot (Queen)--then came the bush again.  Yonge had wheat fields on
+either side, and was only known because it ran north into the bush
+where it became an Indian trail ending at Georgian Bay, and down
+which the natives came with their furs each spring.  All the
+buildings were of logs except the two brick houses of parliament, of
+which York was inordinately proud.  They stood on open ground by the
+mouth of the Don.
+
+Edgar was now wearing his uniform and sword as a militia major;
+Tahata was in elaborately fringed and beaded buckskin, with silver
+mounted tomahawk and scalping knife--and a tall black silk hat!  Ned
+in the clothes his father had given him, wore a fine cloth suit and
+starched much-frilled shirt, with silk stockings and silver
+shoebuckles.  He was realizing that Edgar, militia major, wealthy
+trader, and member of the Upper Canada Legislature, was a man of
+importance.
+
+As the "Susan" stopped, a pretty woman, in lavender silk, with a huge
+bonnet trimmed with flowers and green gauze, came on board, and Ned
+was introduced to his stepmother, with his half-brothers, three small
+boys, between ten and three.  Ned and Susie Edgar liked each other at
+first sight, and were glad to leave together for shore, where Edgar,
+Tahata and Ned were to go to the "Palace".  It was only a log house
+carpeted with skins, but all the formality of a petty court was
+observed within.
+
+"General Sheaffe, whom Brock's death has made our governor, is a
+Swiss," Edgar told Ned.  "He entered the English service when his
+country was over-run by France, and being bred in a Republic, he
+seems afraid of not being formal enough in his position here.  Still
+a deal of ceremony is good policy with the Indians.  A lot of the
+trouble they have had in the States is because the Indians have
+imagined an insult in some informality in council."
+
+After Edgar had made his report to the coldly formal Sheaffe, and
+they were going home, he said to Ned.  "Of course you will join the
+militia now, in the ranks.  You may wonder that I don't buy you a
+commission.  I would promise you that I will in one year, only I know
+by then you will have earned it."
+
+Still talking Edgar reached his great store, crammed with goods for
+Indian trading.  Ned was getting his first sight of the spirit of the
+new world, the ignoring of class distinctions, and the determination
+to rise.
+
+"This isn't England," Edgar said.  "Here the people own the land and
+pretty soon will have the ruling power, and the men whom they will
+choose for leaders will be those who have worked beside them, yet
+risen by their own work."
+
+Ned felt chilled.  He of all people felt no shame in humble
+beginnings, but his father's standards of value depressed him.  He
+wondered what he would think of his Methodism.
+
+Then Ned was taken into the house, built of logs.  It had hall and
+living-room, the last with open fireplace, brass andirons and fender.
+Tall brass candlesticks stood on the mantel, the rugs were of fur,
+and the furniture rough made, but the sideboard held a fine array of
+silver plate, which society then demanded of every one who would hold
+position.  Army officers dragged it through the bush with them, and
+wealthy traders proved their station by the amount they owned.  There
+were books too in the parlor, which made Ned feel more at home.  He
+followed his father past the four smaller bedrooms, and the big guest
+chamber, furnished with bunks round its walls, into the great
+kitchen, where the family ate and spent most of their time.  Ned
+noticed a jug of whiskey with a cup on a small table, for any one to
+help himself.  Then he sat down to supper.
+
+The table was loaded with broiled venison, ham, homemade bread and
+butter, cheese, fruit pies, tea for Susie and the children, and
+whiskey for the men.  On duty Edgar never touched anything but water,
+but now he frowned as Ned refused the whiskey black Bob handed him.
+At that time almost all the house servants in Canada were negroes,
+and Susie kept two, Bob and Fanny.
+
+"Don't be a Methodist, Ned," said Edgar.
+
+"I am one, sir."
+
+"Was one," said Edgar coolly.  "I let you come out forward to knock
+the nonsense out of you."
+
+Ned wisely said nothing, and the next day he put on the dark gray
+uniform of the Canadian militia, took the oath to serve the king and
+obey his officers, being pleased to find that his captain was Archy,
+his father's employee.  He enjoyed his new life and threw himself
+with such zest into his six hours of hard drilling a day, that Edgar
+gave him half grudging approval, but he was still unreasonably sore
+at his son's steady refusal to drink "like a man."
+
+The war was still going on.  Though American attacks on Lower Canada
+and Kingston had been repulsed, and 1812 closed with Canadian soil
+still free from the enemy, and the English flag over Detroit.  Yet
+with their splendid naval victories the Americans were confident of
+conquest.  It was the good seamanship shown in these fights which
+caused dismay in England, and filled the new republic with thoughts
+of its own naval supremacy.  Canada took the news stoically;
+England's hands were too full in Europe for her to send out further
+ships.  Certainly England would conquer Napoleon some day, and till
+then Canada would "hold the fort".
+
+In January, 1813, an American force marched two hundred miles through
+a wilderness to retake Detroit.  They were defeated, and Proctor, the
+English general, was unable to keep his savage allies from butchering
+many of the prisoners who had surrendered to him.  All over the
+States this caused justly bitter feeling.  Forty dollars was offered
+for the scalp of any Indian fighting in the British ranks.
+
+"Don't speak of that at home," Archy told Ned.  "Women folks are
+awful easy scared, and it'll hit your pa."  For the English, to keep
+their Indian subjects under better control, had given Indian military
+rank to the white men, who like Edgar, had been elected sub-chiefs.
+
+* * *
+
+Ned found Susie interested in other things than war, when he went
+home that March evening.  "General Sheaffe is back, Ned," she
+exclaimed, "with Bee and her grandfather, and two companies of
+regulars.  There's going to be the ball of the season at the Palace,
+and I must find out if the fashions have changed much."
+
+"They always change the same way, Sue," said Edgar, "less dress and
+more bonnet.  It's Bonaparte's wife that starts them, and if I were
+he I'd suggest that she tie her dress round her head, and dress the
+rest of herself in her bonnet, for a change."
+
+Then a small whirlwind, and Bee was in the House, in Susie's arms,
+laughing and exclaiming over the little boys, and Edgar welcoming his
+old friend, Dr. Tam.  The surgeon handed Ned a letter.  "From your
+Methodist friend, Ferguson," he said, and Ned hid himself in the
+lofts above the store, to read it without interruption.
+
+"After you left us," Ferguson wrote, "we were ordered to St. Johns,
+near Montreal.  We had to leave our families behind and had a severe
+and tedious march.  The country and people and almost everything
+seemed strange, and not one of those I travelled with knew Canaan's
+language.  But blessed be God, though I was a stranger and a pilgrim
+marching through the 'enchanted ground', I could now and then snatch
+a cluster of pleasant grapes, and see the end of my toils.
+
+"On February 3, we marched to the Isle of Maux on Lake Champlain,
+where there has been some skirmishing with the enemy."
+
+Ferguson went on with many quotations from his only reading--the
+Bible, Hymn Book, and John Bunyan, going rather fully into his
+examination of his own conscience, as to how a man could be a soldier
+and yet "love his enemies".
+
+"I need to consult the Divine Oracle daily," he wrote, "for it is the
+soul's geography, which will show me the path I must needs take."
+
+As Ned finished the letter, he saw his father and Dr. Tam come up
+into the next room which Edgar had fitted up as a "den", and sit down
+to drink together.
+
+"Come in, and take your glass with us," ordered the half-tipsy Edgar,
+as Ned tried to pass the door unseen.
+
+"Yes, come," said Dr. Tam, "even if you are a Methodist.  Lots of
+them take their glass, its only their preachers and saints that set
+up to be so extra good.  Come, you'll never be a man till you drink."
+
+"You're no Methodist," roared Edgar, as Ned sat down unwillingly.
+"What do you mean by writing to them?  Give me that letter that you
+got from one of them to-day, or I'll break your neck."
+
+Ned obeyed, though his eyes flashed.  Edgar read the letter, then
+burst into a torrent of oaths.  "The canting coward," he shouted, "to
+take the king's pay and dare to talk of loving his enemies!  And
+what's this gibberish about picking grapes in a Canadian forest in
+mid-winter?  See here, you'll give me your word right now to drop
+this Methodism, or I'll flog it out of you to-night."
+
+Ned sprang to his feet.  "You can do what you like to me, sir," he
+said sternly, "for you are my father, but if you do touch me, I shall
+leave your house and never enter it again."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+How the Americans Came to York, April 27, 1813.
+
+"Steady, man," said Dr. Tam, with his hand on Edgar's arm.  "The
+laddie's threatening to disinherit you, instead of waiting for you to
+do it to him.  Now, listen, I'm an officer in Ferguson's regiment,
+and no matter what he puts in private letters, which are none of my
+business, I want to tell you something.  Down at Lake Champlain the
+Governor-General, Prevost, visited us.  We were to make an attack on
+the Yankee camp, and the night before I heard Ferguson preaching to
+the men.  He told them that being ready to die made a man more fit to
+live.  A Christian soldier can do his duty more calmly and bravely
+and be more true to the king and obedient to his officers.
+
+"He was standing on a box by a camp fire, with the men all 'round him
+listening in deep silence.  I saw the colonel come up with Governor
+Prevost, who seemed surprised at a soldier's preaching.  The colonel
+said to Captain Haslem, who was there--'What kind of man is Ferguson?
+Does he do his duty?'.  The captain said--'He is always ready for any
+call; all I ever heard against him is his preaching, and reproving
+the men for swearing.'  The Governor said--'I think we will let him
+go on then.  The army needs some chaplains.'
+
+"The Yankees were gone when we went the next day.  Our men plundered
+the farms quite a bit.  I kept my eye on Ferguson, and saw that he
+not only never touched a thing, but kept the men near him better
+behaved than they would have been.  Now, you let the lad be till the
+lake opens.  There'll be stiff fighting then, and if he does his duty
+let him have what religion he likes."
+
+Edgar nodded grumpily, and as Ned left the room, he added, "If he
+fails I'll send him off.  I've worked too hard to make a name here to
+have it disgraced by a Methodist coward."
+
+He said very little to Ned during the next two months.  On the
+twenty-fifth of April, the ice had cleared from Toronto Bay, and Bee,
+in her serge habit and plumed hat, sat very upright on her horse as
+she rode by Sir John along the muddy water front to the wharves.
+
+"They are very slow with those ships," she remarked, with the air of
+a naval expert.  "Major Edgar says there is too much red tape."
+
+"Ladies shouldn't talk of war or politics.  The feminine mind cannot
+understand such things," but Sir John smiled on Bee with kindly
+toleration as he spoke, for he was very fond of the outspoken,
+affectionate girl.  Then his face clouded again.  Three ships should
+have been ready by now, and only one stood complete--the
+"Gloucester", which was then leisurely taking her guns on board.  The
+second ship was ready for launching, and men were working hard on the
+third.  Sir John had not been able to adapt himself to the new
+conditions 'round him, as a younger man might.  He was mainly
+responsible for the delay with the ships, for Archy had been
+recommended to him as a practical ship-builder, and the stately
+baronet had been so scandalized by Archy's free and easy manners and
+lack of grammar, that when that young man pointed out a score of
+makeshifts that could be used on the new ships, and quoted the
+Americans as having built a vessel of sixty-six guns at Sackett's
+Harbor, eighty days after her first timbers had been laid, Sir John
+told him firmly that such things would not do in British
+ship-building.  So snubbed him, that Archy had given no more advice.
+Work on the ships had been stopped continually, while "proper
+equipments" were being dragged up the long trail from Quebec.
+
+"Old man means well, and I kinder like him," Archy told Edgar, "but
+he's so stiffened up with pipeclay that he can't move except
+according to regulations.  I'm getting sorrier all the time that
+General Brock's dead.  Them Shawanese at Detroit wouldn't have acted
+up so if he'd been round, and these ships would have got done."
+
+Blake, the pompous captain of the "Gloucester", came to speak to Sir
+John, and Bee, looking round, saw Susie walking with Ned in his
+militia uniform, along Palace Street.  Susie looked very pretty in
+her short skirted house dress of homespun, with white collar and a
+knot of red ribbon, and one of two young officers riding by stared at
+her with impertinent admiration.  The other, who was Vere, pretended
+not to see Ned, but as they reached Sir John, Roke, his friend,
+remarked, "Pretty thing over there with the red ribbons."
+
+"That lady is the wife of Major Edgar, sir," said Sir John coldly.
+He disliked Roke, whom he blamed for enticing Vere into the drinking
+and gambling bouts which were continually unfitting him for duty, and
+bitterly disappointing his grandfather.
+
+"We don't speak of a lady under a colonel's wife," said Roke to Vere
+as they rode on.  "A captain's wife may be a woman, but under that
+they are only things; and militia titles don't count."
+
+Vere laughed, because he was afraid of being laughed at if he didn't,
+though he was secretly disgusted with Roke's coarseness.
+Unfortunately, Archy, passing by, heard the doubtful joke.  He
+repeated it to four militia men who knew Edgar and his wife well,
+adding, "There's a dance to-night at their Palace place, and Mrs.
+Edgar will be there sure, with most of our women.  Now I haven't
+anything against most of the crowd they'll meet--a bit too starched
+for my taste that's all.  But that there Roke doesn't get to no dance
+in York with our women, and I guess you boys will have to help me
+find him another engagement for to-night."
+
+The ball was at its height that evening (and away at the other end of
+the lake, two frigates with a dozen transports stood out from
+Sackett's Harbour to attack York) when Sheaffe was asking why Roke
+was not there, he having sent for him.
+
+Roke finally entered, smothered in mud from head to foot.  He said
+that as he drove to the ball with his servant, five masked men
+stopped them.  One cut the horse loose and drove him on.  The others
+lifted the light cart and turned it over with its occupants
+imprisoned beneath it in a deep mud hole.  When they got out, the
+five had vanished, but Roke accused Ned and some companions, for he
+imagined the young man had resented his look at Susie.  It was easily
+proved, however, that Ned had not left home that evening, and his
+name was dropped, though Roke still thought him responsible.
+
+All York talked of Roke's mishap the next day, and Sheaffe attempted
+vainly to find the mysterious five.  Then Roke was forgotten, for at
+four in the afternoon Gibraltar Point signalled that the enemy's
+fleet was in sight, about twenty miles away, and approaching them.
+
+York called out her defenders, two hundred regulars, three hundred
+militia, and one hundred Indians.  These last were stationed in
+little groups in the woods round Humber Bay, Edgar and Tahata being
+with them.  The white men spent the night under arms in Fort Toronto,
+while in the town the women buried silver, and tore up linen for
+bandages.
+
+Before dawn Ned was hurrying through the bush with Archy and his
+company, very afraid that a queer feeling he had was fear.  Hideous
+faces daubed in black and white and blood red, peered at them as they
+passed.  The Indians were waiting for the fight in their war-costume
+of loin-cloth and paint.  Only the chiefs wore buckskin shirts and
+leggings, though their faces looked like demon masks.  Suddenly Ned
+met his father, dressed as he had seen him first at Quebec, with a
+belt of wampum as his badge of office.  Now he only held out his
+hand, but his grip and smile steadied Ned's nerves.  He felt that his
+father believed in him, and it gave him confidence in himself.
+
+He crouched in the woods by Humber Bay, watching the enemy's ships.
+They seemed very close now, ghostly looking shapes in the morning
+twilight.  Their boats were being loaded with troops to land beyond
+the range of Fort Toronto's guns.
+
+The boats came in, black shapes on the dawn-lit water, and from every
+point in the woods on the shore came the wildest, most blood-curdling
+sound Ned had ever heard--a long drawn out unearthly yell--the
+war-whoop of the Mohawks.  At the same time they fired, not in
+volleys, but each Indian picking out his man.  Then Fort Toronto
+spoke in fire, for the two warships were nearing the entrance to the
+harbour.  They answered instantly with their heavier guns, and a
+rolling cloud of smoke shut out the sight of the risen sun from
+Humber Bay, and the roar of the cannonading dulled the noise of the
+conflict on the shore.  A mass of blue-clad men had landed there, to
+be met by a savage scattering fire from the Indians and a sheet of
+flame from the ambushed militia.  Ned, for the first time, was firing
+at living men.  His nervousness had vanished, he forgot his scruples
+against war.  He fired, loaded, and fired again, in almost mechanical
+obedience to orders.
+
+He stopped firing on command, for out of the fort came a wave of
+scarlet tipped with steel--the regulars were charging with the
+bayonet on those blue lines forming on the shore.
+
+"My happy grandmother!" ejaculated Archy, "there's something besides
+starch in those fellows, swinging into battle like that.  I just hate
+to fight out in the open; you see----"
+
+Ned never knew what.  The order to charge came to them, and he was
+dashing out of cover at Archy's heels.  He gasped as the man beside
+him fell in a crumpled heap, and the bullets whistled past his ears.
+Then he forgot himself in that mêleé of battling men.
+
+* * *
+
+The sun, a fierce red ball, gleamed through the smoke, and by the
+green woods men in red coats, men in gray coats, and men in no coats
+at all, flung themselves on the blue lines which wavered, and
+stumbled backward into the shallows of the lake.  Now more boats were
+coming from the ships, the American general, Pike, standing in the
+foremost, as he cheered on his men.
+
+Ned was parted from his companions in the rush.  He sprang over a
+log, and fired at an American officer who came at him with uplifted
+sword.  The man fell, and all the delirium of battle passed from
+Ned's brain, as he stared horror-struck at his fallen foe.  The
+American was on his feet again, and the dark blood streaming from his
+shoulder.  He leaned weakly against a tree, and raised his sword.
+Ned looked round and saw a young Indian, frightful with his naked
+painted body and a dripping scalp at his girdle, levelling his musket
+at the wounded man.  Instantly Ned was between them--"Stop, Kawque,"
+he cried to the Indian, "the man is wounded.  He has surrendered."
+
+"I have not," said the American, adding with biting contempt, "I do
+not surrender to a renegade.  I prefer to be shot, rather than
+massacred as my countrymen were, who surrendered to yours at Detroit."
+
+Ned heard the Indian move behind him, and knew in a moment that he
+would see the wounded man shot down.  Something in the American's
+proud eyes gave him an inspiration, and he cried, "Are you Eli Goode?
+I am Ned Edgar, and I know your sister.  For Bee Goode's sake,
+surrender now."
+
+The American's face changed, as quickly as Bee's often did.  He
+lowered his sword, exclaiming, "Bee wrote of you in England."
+
+The Indian glided away, and Eli sank fainting to the ground again.
+Ned cut his coat away, bandaging the wound with a skill he had learnt
+from Dr. Brown.  He did not knew that for a few minutes he and Eli
+had been alone in the thicket, but that they were then surrounded by
+the advancing Americans.  For an instant Ned was covered by a dozen
+rifles, which were raised as quickly as his occupation was
+discovered.  He stood up very dismayed, but the foremost American was
+speaking.  "Reckon you took the captain prisoner, and now we have
+taken you, so an exchange will be all right.  Better chase yourself
+out of this, stranger."  Ned snatched up his rifle and ran.
+
+He was soon back to the woods, where his friends had retreated.  It
+was now ten o'clock, and the battle was lost.  Fort Toronto's
+fortifications had been ruined, and her guns silenced by the enemy's
+fire.  Her garrison had left and fallen back on Western Battery,
+where the scattered men from Humber Bay joined them.  As Ned came in
+he saw the American flag rise over the ruins of their first fort.
+Just then he did not love his enemies at all.
+
+He saw Sir John sitting on his horse as composed in that hour of
+defeat and danger as if he had been on parade.  Ned watched him
+giving orders to the waiting men 'round him, with a great respect for
+British discipline.  Then Edgar hurried by, his stern face softening
+as he saw his son.  He went to Sir John who sent him on to burn the
+ships on the stocks, and wrote another order for Vere to take to the
+captain of the "Gloucester", that she must be blown up.  Then after
+speaking to the men who were spiking the guns of Western Battery, he
+rode off towards Half-moon Fort where Sheaffe was waiting.  Ned and
+his companions followed, plodding along like the weary defeated men
+they were.
+
+Outside Western Battery, Pike and the advancing Americans had halted,
+summoning the silent fort.  But they got no answer, the regulars were
+just leaving, Vere riding by their captain.  Ned saw flames bursting
+from the new ships, and immediately after was thrown to the ground by
+an explosion that shook the earth beneath him.  The powder magazine
+of Western Battery had blown up--an awful volcano of flame and smoke,
+the debris of a fort, and the high-hurled broken bodies of three
+hundred men.
+
+Americans, including General Pike, and English were killed alike, and
+the explosion itself was a mystery.  Certainly neither army could
+have been intentionally responsible for it, entailing as it did, the
+lives of so many men on each side.
+
+Ned picked himself up unhurt, and looked back in horror.  He saw Vere
+stumble up from beside his dead horse, and run a few steps, then fall
+again, brought down by a sharpshooter's bullet.  Many of the
+scattered Americans were sheltering in the woods.
+
+Only remembering the old schoolboy friendship, Ned crept from stump
+to stump, till he was crouching by Vere in the slender cover of a
+pile of brushwood.  Vere's face was drawn, and his eyes, wild with
+fear, stared at Ned as he spoke in panting jerks--"I'm dying, Ned."
+
+"You're not dying, Vere," said Ned, as he skilfully bandaged the
+wound.  It was in the leg, dangerously near a large artery.  Ned knew
+it needed better attention than he could give, but how was Vere to be
+got to Half-moon Fort, across the common swept by the enemy's fire?
+Ned knelt down, managed to get Vere on his back, and praying the
+bandage might not slip, stepped out boldly.  Very slowly he walked
+along beside the forest in whose shades Death crouched, but with
+American chivalry no man fired, and they reached Half-moon in safety.
+
+There Ned was hailed by Archy.  "Hello, didn't know what had become
+of you.  We've got to get out of here.  The women from the Palace are
+in town--Mrs. Haslem and Miss Bee are at your place and the Yankees
+won't hurt anything in petticoats; Sheaffe and the regulars, and the
+wounded in wagons, are making tracks for the Don bridge, and as the
+Yankees won't take the militia prisoners, if they come in and give
+their parole, he says we can do as we like.  You can bet your sweet
+life I ain't going to give no parole, but I'm not going to Kingston
+with Sheaffe either.  I'm off to the bush till I can find a general
+who does things, but it'll be all right for you to look after your
+redcoat friend."
+
+So the very independent militia captain went off, with most of his
+companions, to look for a commander they approved of.  Ned meanwhile
+found a surgeon, and helped put Vere in the last of the hurrying
+wagons, that took the wounded past sullen little York, and crossing
+the Don bridge, plunged into the woods along the Quebec Road
+(Kingston Highway).  Vere sat up and held out his hand to Ned as the
+wagon reached the Don, for Ned was one of the rear guard who were to
+fire the bridge, after the retreating party had crossed.  They did
+this, and Ned managed to be left on the Toronto side of the river.
+Then he made for the woods behind York, hoping to find his sagacious,
+ungrammatical captain.
+
+The smoke from the burning bridge joined that of the fire by the
+wharves, wrapping Edgar, as he stood on the shore, impatiently
+waiting for the messenger with the order that should prevent the
+capture of the "Gloucester".  The Americans had been delayed by the
+confusion following the death of Pike, but Edgar was expecting to see
+their frigates off the wharves every minute.  He had already been
+once to beg the captain to blow her up without the order.  He could
+tell him it had been given, and its non-delivery was no doubt owing
+to the messenger's death in the explosion.  But Blake had declined to
+take orders--or advice--from a militia officer, and Edgar had fumed
+on shore, to hurry back as his quick eye saw the enemy's ships
+advancing slowly through the smoke.
+
+But Half-moon Battery was empty with her guns spiked, and without a
+crew, the "Gloucester" could not fight.  Still her captain refused to
+destroy her till the last minute, and before Edgar could convince him
+it had come, the frigates bore triumphantly down on them, and they
+were ignominiously captured.  York surrendered at once, and at two in
+the afternoon, the American flag was raised over the town.  The
+parliament buildings were sacked and fired, the town escaping by
+payment of a money requisition, but the stores were emptied and many
+houses robbed of silver, the enemy getting a spoil, mainly in furs,
+of half a million dollars.
+
+The officers of the "Gloucester" were sent on shore.  Only Edgar
+stayed.  A lean American pointed at him accusingly--"You are the
+renegade who called yourself Kaanah," he cried.
+
+"That is my name in the lodges of the Mohawks," Edgar answered
+carelessly.  "If you mean to hang me you have a good chance."  He
+glanced at the yardarm above his head, and threw open his collar,
+adding, "I am also a British subject, and England will make you pay
+for my murder.  It would be nothing else, for you cannot find a man
+who can say I have done anything unworthy of my race."
+
+But the men round him were possessed by that hate of the Indian which
+has so often hurried men of the new world into thoughtless reprisal,
+and Edgar would have died, had not a girl appeared among the soldiers
+on the shore.  She was holding the arm of an American officer,
+white-faced and with a bandaged shoulder.  Eli had got himself
+billeted on Susie to protect his sister and her friends, and he had
+gone out with Bee to look for Edgar, whom he knew would be in danger
+if recognized among the prisoners.  Bee saw Edgar, and Eli sent her
+back at once, going on board himself.  "Gentlemen," he said to
+Edgar's judges, "fifteen years ago my father met Mr. Edgar, both
+travelling through the Ohio valley.  They were captured by the
+Shawanese.  Mr. Edgar was spared because he was English, and Tecumseh
+was hoping for the friendship of the English against us.  My father
+was to be burned at the stake, but Mr. Edgar risked sharing his fate
+by pleading and offering bribes, and instead of both dying, both were
+spared, and the Indians named this man Kaanah, 'One-who-is-a-Friend'.
+They were close friends till my father's death, when he left my only
+sister to Mr. Edgar's guardianship.  England may have shamed her
+civilization by her alliance with savages, but though as a soldier
+Mr. Edgar could not choose his duties, I am certain he has never been
+a renegade to his white blood."
+
+Eli's defence of his father's friend was accepted, and Edgar was sent
+to the other prisoners at the palace.  It was night now; in conquered
+York the women grieved for their dead, and prayed for their
+living--the men who were in the woods, and who would not surrender.
+
+As Edgar entered the big room where the English prisoners were, he
+saw Roke among them, and heard him saying--"The worst of all is
+letting them get the 'Gloucester', and Sir John gave Ensign Haslem
+the order for her captain.  I heard him.  And I saw young Haslem
+being carried to a wagon by Ned Edgar, and also saw him hold out his
+hand to Ned, evidently giving him something.  Now, that order was not
+delivered, and as Ned is not among the dead or prisoners, it means
+that he ran without doing what he was ordered."
+
+"You lie," said Edgar promptly.  Roke turned on him angrily, but the
+other men interfered.  Exhaustion was more responsible for peace than
+forebearance, however, and Roke, with most of the others, was asleep,
+when he was awakened some time later by Edgar.
+
+"I'm going to escape," said the militia officer briefly, "I know more
+about this Palace than the men who think they are guarding us, and
+you are going with me.  You called my son a coward, and when we find
+Ensign Haslem, and when he says, as I know he will, that it was not
+to Ned that he gave the letter, I shall take great pleasure in
+shooting you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+How Ned Lost His Good Name, and Vere His Soul.
+
+Two hundred dispirited men straggled wearily through the slough into
+which the spring thaws and rains had turned the Quebec road.  The
+wagons laden with the unhappy wounded sank to their axles in the mud
+holes, and had to be lifted and pulled out by the men, many of their
+occupants begging to be laid by the roadside and left to die in
+peace.  Then, too, they were continually in fear of being attacked by
+the American war ships, the road frequently running on the lake
+shore.  Fortunately for them, the Americans had crossed the lake to
+attack Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) then the wealthiest town in Upper
+Canada, with its strong Fort George.
+
+After weary days the little force crossed the only bridge Kingston
+had left standing, and its loosened planks clattered under their
+feet.  At the news of the fall of York, Kingston had destroyed every
+bridge over the several rivers near her, except one, and that could
+easily have been fired had the enemy landed in the neighbourhood.
+
+Vere had suffered a great deal during the retreat, but he recovered
+rapidly in the pleasant room given him, its windows showing a varied
+view of lake and river, and the harbour where the little war fleet of
+Lake Ontario lay, with the shipping that had escaped the enemy's
+sweep.  As the barracks and officers' quarters were at the eastern
+extremity of the town, he could see much of Kingston itself, looking
+sedate and solid with its many stone buildings.
+
+He was half dozing in pleasant contemplation of all when Sir John
+burst in upon him one morning.  "Did you give the note you were
+carrying when you were wounded to Ned Edgar?" he asked sharply.
+
+"Yes, sir.  Why do you ask?" gasped Vere, his lips growing white as
+he remembered that in his fear he had forgotten the note, which lay
+in his pocket still.
+
+Sir John did not see Vere's face.  He had turned to the window.  "I
+always feared Ned would come to a bad end," he was muttering.  "He is
+missing now, and I hope will continue so--for his father's sake.
+Major Edgar came in with Roke this morning."
+
+The deadly horror that had clutched Vere's heart relaxed its hold,
+for he did not fear sin, but punishment.  Now he thought he had done
+no harm, for Ned was away somewhere, and might never meet these men
+who believed this of him.  Then as Sir John left the room, he limped
+to the fire place, and dropped the paper on the flames.  He was
+called that day before a court of inquiry into the loss of the
+"Gloucester", and gave his false evidence with no more reluctance
+than seemed natural in one who had been Ned's school friend.  Edgar
+listened to him, his face calm, but his very soul scalded with the
+shame he believed Ned had brought upon him.
+
+A week later Ned stood at the gate of Kingston Fort.  He had lost his
+way completely in the woods, and had been found by a hunting party of
+Indians, who when they had got enough game, took it and him to
+Kingston.  So Ned told his story, bewildered at the looks of the men
+who questioned him.  What had he done but try to join his captain and
+company?  Then suddenly his arms were jerked behind him and his
+wrists shackled with steel.  Ned's eyes flamed, and he felt himself
+shaken with fury and resentment.  But surely his father was there,
+and would never let any injustice be done him.
+
+He was still looking for Edgar when he was brought before a court of
+bleak-eyed men, who were in hourly expectation of an attack on
+Kingston.  Newark had sent for help they could not give--and they
+were in no mood to have mercy on anyone who did not do his duty at
+such a time.  Ned's brain reeled as he heard the charge against
+him--of disobedience and cowardice.  In a voice he did not recognize
+as his own, he answered, "I never saw this letter, sir, nor heard of
+it till now."
+
+"Enter the plea, 'Not Guilty'," said the President shortly, as Roke
+was called, and told to tell what he had really seen.
+
+"This man is my enemy," said Ned in a low tone to the officer
+appointed as his counsel, "He is saying this in revenge for a trick
+he thinks I played on him.  If Ensign Haslem were alive and here he
+would say he gave me nothing.  We only shook hands."
+
+"Oh, you thought Ensign Haslem was dead and you could face the rest
+out," said the man.  "You are certainly a cool one."
+
+Ned did not hear him, Roke had told his tale and stepped down, and
+Vere, ghastly pale and limping, was taking the solemn oath.  Then
+with no thought but to save himself, he betrayed the friend who had
+saved him--to death.  In a low voice but without hesitation he
+answered the questions put him.
+
+Like one in the grip of a ghastly nightmare Ned looked 'round him.
+He saw his father, with eyes that had love frozen in them.  He knew
+Edgar believed him guilty too, and he looked despairingly through the
+window where the careless sunshine flashed on the open water under
+the tender May sky.  Would God, who was so careful of the spring
+flowers and nesting birds, let the clean name he valued far more than
+life be taken from him?  Was there any God?
+
+The room grew black round him for an instant, for they were
+sentencing him to die--as a coward.  The instinct of his blood made
+him set his teeth, and force himself to face them calmly--to walk
+steadily from the room, and back to his prison.  But something seemed
+to give way in his brain, and when they left him there, chained in
+the darkness, he was very near the black bounds of insanity.
+
+Vere had left the court directly he gave his evidence, and he looked
+in blank horror at Sir John when he heard the sentence, "You have
+influence, sir," he panted, "I thought--I hoped you would help him.
+He is not as much to blame as you think, and he saved me."
+
+"What on earth do you mean?" Sir John exclaimed irritably.
+
+The truth that would save his soul rose to Vere's lips, but his
+coward spirit kept it from passing them.  "I meant he is so young,"
+he stammered.  "I should have given the note to an older man.  And
+then if he had not put that bandage on, I should have bled to death
+before the surgeon reached me."
+
+To Sir John, to be born a Haslem meant that a man could not lie.  He
+had learned nothing from the old scandal buried in the graves of his
+reckless son, and the weak wicked woman he had married.  Dr. Brown
+could have warned him that Vere needed the wisest training, and that
+drinking would surely rot the weak moral fibres he had inherited.
+Now at twenty he was, even when quite sober, a decaying soul.
+
+Ned roused from a stupor, as a man entered his cell.  It was Sells,
+the blackguard of the "Lightfoot", whom his regiment had managed to
+get rid of, and who was now in the garrison at Kingston.  He felt
+Sells taking the irons off his legs, and the memory of everything
+swept over him like a flame.  He shuddered as if fire had touched his
+flesh, then walked out quietly.  A man waiting put his hand on his
+shoulder, and led him out of doors into a still night, where a big
+moon showed they were in a stump-filled field outside the fort.
+
+They two were quite alone, and Ned felt some surprise.  His escort's
+grip tightened upon his shoulder and he dug his fingers in
+convulsively.  Ned said quietly--"Is it necessary to hold me so
+tightly, sir?  I am not trying to run away."
+
+The sound of his prisoner's voice seemed to madden the man.  With an
+oath he flung Ned from him with all his strength.  Ned went down
+heavily among the limestone outcroppings, and picked himself up,
+bruised and shaken, to face in the moonlight--his father.
+
+Cursing him with the passion of a man utterly beside himself, Edgar
+broke out--"Why didn't you shoot yourself when you knew what you had
+done, instead of coming here to disgrace yourself, and your brothers
+and me?  It's that infernal Methodism that's put the coward taint in
+your blood."
+
+Ned crimsoned at the attack on his faith, and answered as
+passionately as his father--"Why isn't my word as good as Vere
+Haslem's?  I tell you I never saw the letter."
+
+He fell down again before his father's fist.  There was blood on his
+lips where it had struck as he rose, and he did not try to speak
+again but stood with arms folded.  He was indifferent if Edgar should
+kill him, which he seemed quite capable of doing.
+
+"Go," said Edgar thickly, "before I shoot you.  Go to the Yankees,
+curse them!  You're the worst thing I could wish them to have.  I
+only bribed your guard to help you to escape so that your punishment
+shouldn't disgrace your brothers.  But if I ever meet you on Canadian
+soil again, I'll shoot you on sight.  Go, before I do it now."
+
+Ned went blindly into the bush, where a rough voice called him.  He
+knew nothing and cared nothing.  Coming to the shore, he was pushed
+upon a boat which dimly impressed him as a large schooner, and which
+set off at once across the lake.  His brain clearing, he saw she was
+manned by a score of men, in the uniforms of both armies, deserters
+who instead of leaving one side to join the other, meant to form a
+gang with Sells for the leader, and hide in the woods near Niagara,
+plundering all they could.  "And you want me to join you?" said Ned
+indifferently, as Sells explained their intentions to him.
+
+"We'll make you want to.  We want you, for Dr. Tam on the 'Lightfoot'
+said you could do a little of his job quite decently.  We won't hurt
+you if you do as you are told, and as you seem one of the coward
+sort, we'll leave you behind when there's any fighting going on.
+We're taking you to mend hurts, not to make them, and you can amuse
+us too--give us a mock Methodist sermon when we're dull.  I wonder
+what Ferguson will say when he hears that his pet ran away in the
+first battle?  I never thought till I saw you in the court that you
+were like that."
+
+In the darkness Ned's fists clenched, but he did not strike the
+mocking face before him.  He felt that a blinded Justice had robbed
+him of the right to resent insult.  So he answered sullenly, "Any man
+who was a coward would be glad to join you."
+
+They took that for his assent, and left him to pretence of sleep.  He
+lay listening to the talk of these men who had dropped all thought of
+decency and were thieves, and there came to him the temptation to end
+his life.  This scum of society was henceforth to be the only class
+open to him--no honest man would ever touch his hand again.  Why not
+"Curse God and die?"
+
+In Kingston, the next morning, Ned's escape was discovered, but only
+Sells was blamed for helping him, and their names were posted
+together as deserters.  No one paid much attention.  Across the lake
+Fort George, the key to Niagara, was answering the heavy cannonade of
+the American fleet.  And on that same day, May 27, the British war
+ships with a thousand men on board, left Kingston to attack Sackett's
+Harbour, hoping that the absence of the American fleet would enable
+them to capture the naval stores there.  It was a day of double
+defeat.  In the afternoon a carrier pigeon dropped into Kingston with
+a note that said Vincent, the commander at Fort George, running out
+of powder, had retired into the bush after spiking his guns and
+firing his stores.  The Americans had not followed him, they having a
+very exaggerated idea of the number of Indians in the British
+service.  They now held Newark, and the entire Niagara district.
+
+Then the fleet came back from Sackett's Harbour, leaving three
+hundred men, dead, wounded, and missing, behind them.  Among them was
+Edgar, who had volunteered to join the landing party, which had been
+hemmed in and captured.
+
+[Illustration: "Dropped noiselessly overboard and swam ashore."]
+
+And Ned, in the deserters' boat, as the dark madness that suggested
+suicide still held his mind, saw that the shore was near, and taking
+a musket, dropped noiselessly overboard and swam to shore.  There he
+wandered into the bush, not knowing where, only avoiding every trail
+of man, for his brain had been so weakened by the shock of his unjust
+condemnation that he felt he was too disgraced ever to let any man of
+any nation see his face again.  He shot some game, and spent a few
+days in a tiny limestone cave, then wandered on restlessly, sleeping
+one night in the bush.  Waking the third morning in utter despair, he
+was almost surprised to hear himself calling out, "What shall I do?"
+
+"Be good, that's all," said a clear voice near him, and he sprang up
+in alarm, to face Bee in a homespun skirt and calico sunbonnet.  He
+heard the sound of chickens and cow-bells, and saw he was close to
+York.
+
+"Ned Edgar!" she exclaimed in delight.  "I am so used to have
+sentries stopping me everywhere, that when I heard you speak, I
+thought I had better say my name, and let you see me."
+
+"Be good, that's all," repeated Ned, looking at her with dazed eyes.
+"But what can I do good now?  Where shall I go?"
+
+Bee gasped, dashed off, and was back in a minute with a brimming can
+of milk.  "Drink this," she said severely, and as Ned obeyed, she
+added, "You are disgraceful; all the men I know are.  They shoot each
+other, and get hurt, and go without proper meals, when they might be
+at home doing respectable work.  Do you know a wonderful thing has
+happened?  Cousin Betty has the dearest baby in the world, and she is
+here with Mamma Edgar, and Eli is taking care of us all.  The baby's
+name is York--and Cousin Percy stays with his regiment at Lake
+Champlain, or somewhere.  If I were he I would die if I didn't fly
+home and see my delicious baby the minute it came.  But you must come
+to the house with me and have breakfast."
+
+Revived by the milk, Ned followed Bee into York; desolate York with
+the ashes of her buildings lying black beside the fields no one had
+plowed or sown that spring.  Ned missed the military life at the
+barracks, and the flag he had always seen over them.  The American
+forces had left, Bee told him, but their ships came in constantly,
+and Eli was there now.  There were few men in the place, no one came
+to trade, and the streets looked forlorn, for the blight of war was
+on the land.
+
+Edgar's empty store, with its doors swinging idly open, gave Ned a
+shock.  His father, Bee told him was a prisoner of war, but Susie
+would be glad to see him.  Evidently the news of his disgrace had not
+reached York, but he knew he must not go under his father's roof, nor
+eat his bread.  He began to say something of this, but Bee stopped
+him.  "We will have breakfast out of doors, and eat what Eli brought."
+
+"You don't understand, Miss Bee, what my father thinks I am."
+
+"I can guess, I know Papa Edgar, but being an American I don't see
+things as he does.  Eli and I have been hoping you would do it."
+
+"I don't know what you are talking about, but you certainly don't
+know the truth, and you must hear it before we go any further."
+
+Without preface he told her of his arrest at Kingston, and then the
+trial.  Bee's bewilderment at the abrupt beginning changed to horror
+as he repeated Vere's evidence.  "Poor Vere," she murmured.
+
+"What do you pity him for?" said Ned roughly, "even if you do think
+me guilty."
+
+"You?  You are strong, you will soon get over this; it is only a
+little thing," (Ned wondered what her idea of serious trouble was)
+"but Vere was a traitor to you, and traitors must go to--to their own
+place."  Her voice sank to a whisper, but she dared not say the
+terrible name.
+
+The straight, strong faith he had accepted once came back to Ned
+then.  Time seemed nothing beside eternity, the blundering injustice
+of men too little a thing to think of beside the awful Justice of
+God, high-throned in eternal calm.  He raised his head for the first
+time since they had chained him at Kingston--"Then you do not think I
+am guilty, though Sir John does?" he asked her.
+
+She laughed softly.  "You a coward--who saved my brother!" she
+exclaimed, and before he guessed what she meant to do, she had kissed
+him on his forehead, flushing a little as the instinct of a young
+girl made itself felt through the impulsive abandon of a child.
+"That is what I think of you," she repeated.  "I never kissed any man
+but Sir John, and Papa Edgar and Eli before, but I think I love you
+nearly as much as Eli, and I believe in you as much as I do in him.
+Now, sit right down here, while I get breakfast."
+
+Ned sat down, but that kiss had given him back his courage and
+self-respect; he knew now what he could do.  Then Bee came out again,
+followed by Chloe with a tray of dishes, and Eli with the coffee pot.
+
+So they sat down to their pic-nic meal.  Eli was startled at Ned's
+white face, and evident nervous condition, but put it down to
+dejection at the British defeats, and weeks of starving in the bush.
+He talked about the weather, and tried to stop Bee when she started
+on the war, but that young lady insisted on talking as she liked.  "I
+hope this dreadful war is almost over," she said earnestly.  "Upper
+Canada is conquered except Kingston and those few men from Fort
+George who are in the bush.  Brother Eli, what are you making signs
+at me for?  What are you trying to make me do?"
+
+"Nothing, I assure you, my dear girl.  I may be able to manage the
+crew of a ship, but I know I couldn't one woman, even a very young
+one.  Do you ever let any body boss you, Bee?"
+
+"Only Cousin Betty; I have to do all she says.  She made a heap of
+regulations for my conduct, and put me on my honour to report to her
+when I break one.  I always write my reports in a book and give it in
+to her.  I made the book myself--its title is 'The sins of a
+Lifetime, being the Confessions of Miss Beatrice Truth Goode, of
+Boston.'  And its motto is from that dearest Sir Walter Scott--'High
+minds most deeply feel thy pangs, Remorse.'  Then I have to sew
+seams, for punishment, miles and miles of seams, I am sure.  And now,
+Ned, I suppose you will have to lodge at Widow Giles.  Mamma Edgar
+can't have you in the house after what your father said, but she will
+be delighted that you are looking after the place, we can't get a man
+to do anything.  I don't understand the Canadian militia not coming
+in, when they know they have only to give their parole and go to
+their homes, where now just women and old men are trying to do the
+work; and as they can't put in crops enough, they will all be
+starving next winter.  I am so glad you are sensible, and willing to
+be friends."
+
+Ned stood up very embarrassed, and realizing that these friends, the
+only ones he seemed to have, were by the unnatural laws of war his
+enemies.  "Captain Goode," he said, "I must apologize to you and Miss
+Bee.  I think I lost my senses in the bush, for I forgot we were at
+war till this minute.  I cannot give my parole, so must surrender
+myself to you as a prisoner."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+How Ned Planned to Justify Bee's Faith in Him.
+
+"I don't take prisoners at my table, Mr. Edgar," said Eli quietly,
+while the happy laughter died out of Bee's face and she looked
+bleakly at the two young men.
+
+"But I thought the war was over," she cried.  "Brother Eli, you said
+that when the Americans had York and Newark, Upper Canada would
+realize that she must change her flags, and the Canadian militia
+would all come in and give their paroles not to fight any more, and
+then they would go to their farms; and now they are all staying in
+the bush, and even Ned, who I thought had come in, says he hasn't.
+What are you going to do with him?"
+
+"That is for you to say, Bee, you brought him in, and I presume you
+had better let him go out again.  Some more coffee please, with lots
+of sugar."
+
+Bee was very silent the rest of the meal, then she took Ned to see
+the baby, which Chloe was nursing.  Betty asked Ned eagerly after her
+men; she was thinking too much of Percy, of whose whereabouts they
+knew nothing, to notice Ned's embarrassment as he answered her.  Then
+Bee and Ned were out in the garden by themselves.
+
+"What are you going to do?" Bee demanded.
+
+"With your permission, Miss Bee, I will go to our men at Stony Creek,
+or near.  They have no communication with Kingston, so I can join
+them, and hope for a chance to retrieve my good name."
+
+"Yes, I understand, I suppose you must go on fighting," she answered
+with a wan smile.  "Here is a bag of bread, and you have your gun.
+Good-bye."
+
+Ned had a long lonely tramp along the lake shore, till one morning,
+it was June 6, he heard at dawn the roar of distant cannon, and knew
+the invaders had located, and were attacking Vincent.  All that day
+he walked on steadily, feverishly eager to know how the fight had
+gone.  The long summer day was ending, when he heard the sounds of
+many men near him in the gloom, though there was no smell of smoke or
+gleam of a camp-fire.  Ned went on carefully, saw a redcoated sentry,
+was challenged by him, and was the next moment exuberantly greeted by
+Tim Kelly.
+
+"Sure, and its the Swaddler's friend," Tim cried.  "Are you asking if
+he's alive and well?  Just swear a bit, me boy, and he'll be down on
+you immediate.  No, we're not at Lake Champlain, we're here, breaking
+our hearts entirely marching through woods that last forever and
+ever.  We left our women at Montreal, and have been getting through
+the forest ever since, talking in whispers and walking on our
+tiptoes.  Barring the time we were at Kingston, we've never been able
+to light a fire, and my stomach's about dead with eating uncooked
+meat and things, and the Swaddler's real worried because he can't
+stop to wash his clothes; if he'd been a gentleman born, he couldn't
+hate being dirty more."
+
+"Were you at Kingston long?" asked Ned with a great fear in his
+heart.  He had meant to give an assumed name when he found the
+fighting force, but now this was impossible.  And though Tim
+evidently knew nothing, his officers might.
+
+"Just long enough for Ferguson to find a bunch of Swaddlers," said
+Tim carelessly.  "Do you know, me boy, why the heathen here paint
+their faces?"
+
+"I suppose it is their custom," Ned answered absently.
+
+"It's because these woods are cruel hard on clothes, me boy, and when
+a man has only half of nothing left of his trousers he naturally
+paints to hide his blushes."
+
+* * *
+
+Ned was passed into the lines, where Percy met him, and the captain's
+greeting told him he was in no fear of discovery as yet.  He was
+given food, and a large ration of whiskey, which he refused.
+
+"Look here, young man," said the old sergeant severely, "do you know
+you're a fool?  Going without drink's bad for a man's health,
+especially when like now he can't get proper cooked food.  We don't
+want tee-total fanatics in the army, they'd break down on a hard
+march."
+
+"Let him alone, Giles," said Percy's voice behind them in the dark.
+"Don't you know he is a Swaddler, like Ferguson?  You know he never
+touches liquors, and he has not broken down through all this hard
+marching.  I should imagine you would like more 'fanatics' like him,
+who never grumbles at anything, and stands the hardest work better
+than stronger looking men than himself."
+
+"Stick to your Swaddling, Ned," Percy added, as the sergeant left
+them, "you'll have a lot of temptations here with us, but don't
+backslide--I think that is what you call it.  You will do well for
+yourself if you keep steady, and you'll do that if you can keep to
+what you are now.  Do you remember a man called Sells, on board the
+'Lightfoot'?  He had some education, but drink and wild living
+wrecked his life and he enlisted.  He might have risen then, for he
+had the ability to lead men, but drink brought him into continual
+disgrace.  He's at Kingston now, too degraded ever to rise again."
+
+Ned was thankful it was too dark for Percy to see his face, and he
+was glad to be sent on to Ferguson, whose blanket he shared that
+night.
+
+"It seems a long time since our first night in Canada," the Methodist
+said.  "How is it with you?  In all our hard marching I have seemed
+to be dwelling in the clefts of the Rock."
+
+"You were at Kingston?" Ned asked, not knowing what to say.  He
+longed to confide in Ferguson, yet dare not compromise him by letting
+him know his friend was legally an escaped criminal.
+
+"Yes," Ferguson answered, "everything had a warlike appearance
+there--God and eternity forgotten.  I asked if there were any
+Methodists in town, and a peddler told me of a militia captain who
+was also a class leader.  The man spoke with a blush, for he had been
+one of our travelling preachers, but had backslidden, and taken up
+worldly work.  Still he was very kind to me.  He introduced me to the
+class leader captain, whose company was like 'a water brook to the
+panting hart'.  I had been so long away from any who knew Canaan's
+language."
+
+"I can't understand why our lives should be so hard to live some
+times," Ned spoke with a bitterness that surprised his friend.
+
+"In the secret of His tabernacle did He hide me," said Ferguson
+quietly.  "My great trouble on this march is the injury this army has
+done to the farmers on our way.  We have plenty of meat, but not much
+else to eat, and the men will steal handfuls of garden stuff, or slip
+out and milk a cow.  I have kept from touching anything that was not
+paid for, and God has given me favor in the sight of all.  My
+comrades will not swear or steal in my presence, and any privilege I
+ask of my officers is readily granted."
+
+Ned slept then till he was awakened by Ferguson's touch.  All round
+tired men were sleeping heavily, but a wonderful dawn was flushing
+the sky above Lake Ontario, which was turning from dull gray to the
+tints of a pearl shell.  Overhead the birds were calling, and
+Ferguson had risen in accordance with the discipline of his church,
+which bade a man rise an hour before his work compelled him to, to
+read the Bible on his knees, and pray.  Ned had forgotten to pray
+since his life had been blasted by a traitor's lie, but now he knelt
+by Ferguson, thanking God for the young girl's kiss that had given
+him courage to face his world again.
+
+And now for the chance to clear his name.  At present communication
+with Kingston was almost impossible, and if he could win a name for
+bravery with Vincent, or with this column that was marching to his
+relief, it might influence the judges who had misjudged him so.
+
+There was plenty of excitement in their marching the next few days.
+The Americans had discovered the column by now, and knew that they
+were going to join Vincent, so the ships constantly landed parties
+who lay in ambush.  The regiment never saw its enemies, there would
+be a quick spatter of shot from the green cover, a man or two would
+fall, but the angry bayonet charge that was the prompt answer of the
+British found nothing but leaves to use their steel upon; the
+woodsmen from Kentucky were too quick to be caught by these heavy
+footed new-comers to the world of lake and bush.
+
+So they came to the bay where to-day our city of Hamilton stands.
+Near by, in June, 1813, was the village of Stoney Creek, a straggling
+street, outlined by orchards.  Beyond rose Burlington Heights, with
+the raw earthworks and log ramparts of Vincent's entrenchments, and
+the battle-frayed flag of England floating above them.
+
+Stoney Creek had a little Methodist church, the first Ferguson or Ned
+had seen in the new world.  The needs of war had pressed it for a
+hospital, and from its doors a joyful crowd of bandaged men, Archy
+among them, greeted the relief force.
+
+"We're glad to see you all right," said Archy.  "Though we wasn't in
+no hurry to get relieved.  We beat the Yankees sure on June sixth,
+and fought some too.  Them trees show that, I guess."
+
+The trees did, to the men who were now among the orchards--great
+branches broken and trunks scarred everywhere by bullets.  On June
+sixth the enemy had located Vincent, and knowing he was without
+artillery and almost out of powder, they landed three thousand men,
+who camped that night in the orchards of Stoney Creek.  In the
+morning they meant to attack, and with the help of their ship's guns,
+capture Vincent's army before the relief column with abundance of
+ammunition arrived.
+
+"Blamed foolish of them Yankees," said Archy.  "They oughter have
+piled everything they've got on Kingston, and picked us up any old
+time.  Chasing after us like they are, makes me think of a man trying
+to cut a tree down by taking an axe to its branches.  Kingston's the
+trunk.  If it fell it would mean Upper Canada was cut off totally."
+
+"We had fourteen hundred men," put in another man, "and Colonel
+Harvey who did some fighting in Egypt with Bonaparte--and learned to
+know how to do a few things too--wanted a night attack, as we had no
+powder.  He led it, and it was hot and heavy while it lasted, but
+cold steel made the enemy glad to get back to their ships.  They
+started banging away, but Harvey and his men were back on the
+Heights, and the enemy went back to get reinforcements."
+
+Then Archy saw Ned, and called to him to know how he came there.  "I
+was lost in the bush several times, sir," Ned answered, hoping he did
+not look as guilty as he felt.  "At last I fell in with the relief
+column.  I tried to find you when I left York."
+
+"Awful bad habit, Ned, this getting lost in the bush.  When I got in
+here and reported myself to General Vincent, he asked me why I hadn't
+stayed with Sheaffe and gone to Kingston.  I says, 'My memory's awful
+bad, General, I couldn't for the life of me remember if Kingston was
+east or west, so I got here; I guess some folks can't just help
+forgetting things.'  And he laughed, 'cause I'd come in with the
+Indian who brought the note from Sheaffe saying he was to go to
+Kingston, and so he knew I knew that he meant to 'forget' to obey it."
+
+So Ned slipped back to his old place in Archy's company, and was
+rather startled to find himself raised to sergeant.  He worked hard
+at his duties, but he was oddly silent, and seemed to shrink away
+from his friends--so the men who knew him best, Ferguson, Archy, and
+the keen-eyed Percy, thought.
+
+It was a long summer of guerilla warfare rather than battle.  The
+enemy, with somewhat unwise generalship, wasted their forces trying
+to crush the elusive British army at the Burlington end of the lake;
+it dividing, uniting, and disappearing, trying to give the enemy the
+impression at least treble its numbers.
+
+"Play a waiting game," said Harvey, who with Fitzgibbons, was the
+most daring and popular of the leaders.  "Keep the enemy in complete
+ignorance of your numbers and movements, and know everything about
+him."  It was possible to do this because the men who defended, had
+the woods to fall back on.  When attacked they retreated, while their
+Indians hung on the enemy's flanks if they tried to follow, keeping
+his men awake all night with war-whoops, and playing on their nerves.
+Then the invader would fall back on the settlements, where the few
+men, and every woman and child was a spy for their men in the bush.
+The Americans came and went in sulky desolate York.  They held full
+possession of the Niagara district, the oldest settled and richest
+part of Upper Canada.  There they kept their men in strict order
+hoping to make these obstinate Canadians realize they were friends,
+but not even a child could be coaxed to give a "Yankee" any
+information, even of the most harmless kind.
+
+Laura Secord, in the Niagara village of St. Davids, whose militia
+husband was a prisoner of war, cooked in her kitchen for the American
+officers who had quartered themselves in her house, and overheard
+their plans to trap Fitzgibbons.  She passed the sentry at her door
+with a pail to milk her cow--and instead plunged into the bush, and
+walked twenty miles, reaching the men she sought utterly exhausted,
+but with the news that made them able to ambush the enemy, and win
+the little battle of Beaver Dam, on June twenty-fourth.
+
+And because Laura Secord did only what almost every woman in Upper
+Canada would have done in her place, the United States did not
+conquer Canada.
+
+A month after Beaver Dam, a party of officers were dining at Stoney
+Creek, which was still Vincent's headquarters.  They were the guests
+of Archy, who had risen in rank in the bush fighting, but had not
+improved in grammar.  The men were unkempt-looking after their rough
+living, and lack of many of the appendages of civilization.  Only
+Percy wore his patched and shabby garments with an uneradicable air
+of neatness.  He and Archy were close friends now, probably because
+in all outside matters they were entirely unlike.  The party ate from
+silver plate, and tin dishes, at a table formed by setting two
+shutters on three barrels.  Their fare was roast beef and venison in
+abundance, with a little dark bread, and a mess of mixed greens.  War
+was pinching Upper Canada hard, her crops would be very scanty, and
+the government had already bought all the flour to be found, paying
+the sometimes unwilling settlers twenty dollars a barrel, which was
+considerably above the market price.  Bread was selling at forty
+cents a large loaf, and scanty rations of flour were doled out to the
+army, who had to live mainly on meat, the farmers naturally refusing
+to sell vegetables, fruit, or butter at any price, for they had the
+winter to look forward to.  The Indians brought in berries and edible
+greens, and nobody starved.
+
+Archy was looking doubtfully at the brew his servant was pouring into
+cups.  "This here, gentlemen," he said, "is birch bark tea.  I don't
+think its poison, and I was so sick of those herb drinks that I
+thought I'd try it.  If you don't like it, call it a horror of war."
+
+Desert--a pot of cooked fruit, small peaches and apples, was on the
+table, with a jug of whiskey, and Percy said to the host.  "I trust
+you came by that fruit honestly.  Ferguson is wearing himself out
+trying to head off three thousand irresponsible vagabonds from
+picking up green fruit that doesn't belong to them.  I often feel I
+am the most virtuous man in the camp, for except when I dine out, I
+know I get nothing to eat but what is paid for."
+
+"It's starch you mean to steal, if you hear of any," said Archy,
+laughing.
+
+Percy sighed as he looked at the limp frills of his shirt.  "That is
+the worst thing I have to endure," he said.  "If I hear of starch I
+shall certainly wait till Ferguson is intent on some other criminal
+and go out and steal it myself.  Isn't that Ned Edgar over there?  He
+is certainly making a good record for himself, though he always looks
+to me as if he had something on his mind."
+
+Ferguson thought the same, and bewildered that Ned seemed avoiding
+him, he met him that afternoon by the desecrated chapel, and Ned
+could not escape speaking to him.  Ferguson looked sadly into the
+building, for the bunks for the sick round its walls had been made of
+broken up pulpit, seats, and communion table.  So war had ordered.
+
+"I feel with Habakkuk," Ferguson remarked, "grieved for the Church
+lest when her carved work and hedges are broken down she should
+suffer loss.  But the breaking up of a church building like this does
+not matter if the members are strong in the faith.  We are to have a
+meeting to-night in Father Williams' barn.  He is that aged saint who
+leans on his staff and worships.  We also need some candles, and
+though the good sister who owns this orchard has plenty, she is
+prejudiced against soldiers, so I want you to go to see her, and--"
+
+"I will ask the lady for the candles," said Ned in a constrained
+voice, "but I may not be at your meeting, I may have duties."
+
+He was off then, before the astonished Ferguson could answer him.
+Four years in the army had given the Methodist a thorough knowledge
+of the things that lead many young men astray, but Ned avoided the
+reckless set among his comrades, as much as he was now keeping away
+from his Methodist friends; and the little soldier felt utterly at a
+loss.
+
+Meanwhile Ned had gone to the big farm house belonging to the lady
+who owned the candles.  She was middle-aged and militant looking and
+she regarded Ned coldly.  "The regulars are stealing my fruit
+whenever my back is turned," she said, "and the militia have taken
+eighty fence rails for firewood.  Pray what do you want here?  Tell
+me at once, and don't be saucy."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+  How Ned Had Many Adventures, and Bee
+  Becomes a Woman.
+
+Ned thought a man would have to be mad or very drunk before he could
+be saucy to such a lady, and he answered in his meekest voice, "We
+wanted to hold a prayer meeting, madam, and hoped you might be so
+good as to give us some candles."
+
+"For the land's sake, a prayer meeting!  Not but what you need them
+badly.  But whoever is going to hold a prayer meeting?  There isn't a
+chaplain of any sort here."
+
+"We have a soldier preacher, madam, a Mr. Ferguson."
+
+"What, not one of those soldiers?"  Astonishment and unbelief were in
+the lady's tones.
+
+"Yes, madam, he preaches very well too, and I hope you will come to
+hear him.  He never steals apples or anything, for he is a Methodist.
+And while I admit he is a private in the ranks, still it doesn't do
+always to say 'Can any good come out of Nazareth?'"
+
+She looked at him.  His manner was certainly not what she would have
+looked for in a private soldier, and changing her attitude with
+feminine quickness, she said--"Come right in and sit down.  Here's a
+pie right out of the oven and you must try it.  Not hungry?
+Nonsense; men, especially soldiers, always are.  Now, tell your Mr.
+Ferguson to call on me.  If it isn't some trick of you boys I'll keep
+you in candles.  I'm a Methodist myself, but its hard not to grow
+cold in religion when there's no church, and war's making everybody
+wild.  My husband and three boys are all out with the militia--and
+they won't quit fighting while there's a Yankee in Canada.  But it's
+hard on flesh and blood to see a farm like the one we had here going
+to wrack and ruin, without a man to do a hand's turn.  But I
+shouldn't complain, my house is filled with officers, and they pay me
+well.  And the cows, and the stuff the girls and me did get in, are
+doing splendid."
+
+From the farm Ned went at once to Archy, to see if he couldn't be
+sent out again at once--to avoid meeting Ferguson--and found Percy
+there before him.  "How'd you like to change into the regulars, Ned?"
+said Archy briskly.  "I hate to lose you, for you're a kind of
+reliable--from that first hour when you were under fire at Humber
+Bay, you've been to be depended upon.  But Captain Haslem's going
+with his company to try and steal some Yankee flour up Niagara way,
+and he'll take you, if you're willing, and its a good chance for you."
+
+"You would have the rank of sergeant," said Percy, "and the position
+of 'Talk Man', as you call an Indian interpreter; for your captain
+says you studied the Indian dialects with your father last winter in
+York.  Then we shall have no surgeon with us, and as Dr. Tam
+recommends you highly as an emergency one, I think you can be sure of
+getting a commission before six months are out."
+
+Ned knew Ferguson had been assigned by Percy to duty with the
+commissariat and transport, which would keep him in Stoney Creek, so
+he thanked his friends and accepted.  He set off that same day, one
+of seventy-five white men, with a dozen Indian scouts.
+
+They reached the Niagara district, and lay low in the great forest
+that filled the back of the fertile peninsula between the lakes Erie
+and Ontario.  Before them was the garden land of Canada, guarded by
+forts Erie and George, on the upper and lower lakes--and both alas
+held by the triumphant enemy--fronted by the deep gorge of the wild
+Niagara River.  For the first time Ned heard the far-off awful roar
+of the great falls, and in a sense he was afraid, for he understood
+why the Indians said it was the voice of God.
+
+But he had little time to think of the mysterious poetry of the Great
+Waters.  The party were marching silently across Niagara in the
+night.  Tiny lights, placed by brave women in farmhouse windows, told
+Percy all he needed to know, and so they crept down to the shore by
+Fort Erie, and seizing boats, put out, as a sentry challenged them.
+
+"Provision boats from Buffalo," Percy answered instantly, and so they
+passed.
+
+Across Niagara River twinkled the lights of Buffalo and Black Rock,
+and before them three ships laden with stores, loomed up dark as they
+lay at anchor.  The first was boarded with a savage rush of excited
+men.  In five minutes she was mastered, and scudding out into Erie,
+keeping the other ships between her and the guns of the fort till she
+was out of range.
+
+At dawn the prize was lying in a little bay.  She had landed part of
+the men, including Ned and the Indians, with a good portion of her
+cargo of flour, when the 10-gun "Hunter", one of the British
+war-fleet on Erie, came up.  She was to take the boat and part of the
+stores to Detroit, that one bit of American soil to which Canada was
+clinging.  She felt that she was not quite conquered while she held
+it, though her garrison there were very short of food.
+
+So the war went on that summer, until it was September; and on
+Friday, the tenth of that month--a day to be marked in American
+histories--Betty sat in Susie's best room, feeling depressed.  Susie
+was with her, but both women were silent, thinking of their husbands.
+Susie knew that Edgar had escaped, had got to Detroit, and then had
+heard no more, and so she worked and suffered as thousands of brave
+women did in that olden war.  She had herself and her children to
+keep on what she could get from her garden and cows and poultry, for
+there was no possibility of getting food from outside.  The
+Americans, honourable invaders all, though they knew the women in the
+country they occupied must be continually sending information to the
+men in the bush, yet would not punish the captive but unconquered,
+towns and villages.  They had only burnt and plundered buildings
+owned by the government.  But to Susie and Bettie, and many other
+women, the worst was the impossibility of knowing even if their men
+folk were living or dead.
+
+* * *
+
+One day Chloe was at the door beaming on them; a small ship had
+managed to run in from Kingston; her lading was ammunition for the
+men at the west end of the lake, but she had left a bundle of mail,
+and a woman in Quaker-like dress, at York.  It was Mrs. Ferguson, who
+had just made the risky journey from Montreal, and she brought a note
+from Percy to his wife, asking Betty to keep her with herself, till
+his commanders would allow women to come where he and the others were
+fighting.
+
+Betty welcomed her warmly, overjoyed to hear from her husband, and
+know him alive somewhere--though his letter had run the blockade to
+Montreal, and back again as far as York, before it reached her.  She
+had sent letters by the same boat, hoping he would get them.
+
+Then Betty read the letter from Sir John at Kingston.  He did not
+mention Ned, so Bee was still the only one above Kingston who knew of
+the boy's disgrace.  Sir John wrote--"Vere is steadying to his work
+like the Haslem and gentleman-born that he is.  He is expecting
+promotion, and may be sent to Montreal.  I have spoken to him of Bee,
+and like his spirit very much, for he is quite willing to overlook
+that she is penniless, and that her mother made a disgraceful
+marriage with an American.  So I am hoping to arrange for you and Bee
+to travel to Kingston under a flag of truce.  The enemy, in spite of
+their Infernal and Thrice Damnable Republicanism, seem to act like
+gentlemen whenever our women are concerned.  So you can prepare Bee
+for her marriage soon.  She is a wilful minx sometimes, but I am sure
+she will be overjoyed at the prospect of being Lady Haslem some day."
+
+Betty was not so sure.  She looked out into the fine rain that had
+begun to fall, while a south wind blew, and saw Bee racing home with
+the three Edgar boys.  Then Bee was in the room, flushed and
+laughing, her eyes shining like stars, and her coarse homespun frock
+showing her strong young figure.  That dress had been made from wool
+off Susie's sheep, spun and woven in York, for the women who made the
+holding of Canada possible in 1812, had to depend on themselves for
+clothing as well as food.
+
+"You do look quite grown-up, Bee," said Betty.  "Next thing you will
+be thinking of getting an establishment."
+
+Bee knew that her world had no room for an unmarried woman, but she
+said nothing as Betty went on.  "You could be very happy living with
+me--and I would love to keep you--while you are young and
+handsome--oh, yes, dear, you are that now--but when you grew old and
+faded and sour-tempered, like all unmarried women do, you would blame
+me for not helping you to get established while you were young
+enough."
+
+"But nobody wants to marry me," murmured poor Bee, heartily wishing
+that girls did not have to grow up.
+
+"Someone does, Bee, I know there has been a little against him, but I
+have just heard that he is retrieving himself splendidly.  We women
+have to overlook very much in men, as long as they are not cowards."
+
+Betty did not mention Vere's name, and Bee suddenly thought of Ned,
+poor Ned!--yet not so poor if a woman like Betty believed in his
+innocence.  Knowing as she did what Sir John thought of her mother's
+marriage, she never dreamed that he thought of her (with an American
+father) as a future Lady Haslem, but confused at the idea of an
+establishment, even with Ned, she turned to ask Betty what she had
+heard of him.  Then through the open window the damp wind brought the
+terrible sounds of far-off cannon, and they both forgot marrying and
+giving in marriage, as all that day, they and the other women in York
+listened with straining ears to catch the faint sounds that meant the
+men they loved might even then be dying among those thundering guns.
+
+That day the most spectacular, if not the most important battle of
+the war was fought.  In a last attempt to break the American hold on
+Lake Erie, and save Detroit from starvation, Barclay, one of Nelson's
+captains, with six ships and carrying light guns, put out against
+Perry, the young and daring American, with his nine ships, and doubly
+heavy cannon.
+
+The American Lawrence, with her flag inscribed "Don't give up the
+ship," led into battle.  It was a battle of seamanship.  Barclay
+wished to fight at long range where the better marksmanship of his
+men might offset the heavier guns of his enemy, and Perry meant to
+come to close quarters.  The Lawrence was soon a wreck, with only
+twenty men on board unhurt, and Perry transferring himself and his
+flag to the Niagara, through a storm of shot.  Then with consummate
+seamanship he brought his fleet to where their broadsides "tore hulls
+clean of masts and decks," and Barclay surrendered the tiny British
+fleet--a drove of shattered, blood-drenched wrecks, laden with the
+mangled bodies of one-third of their crews.
+
+"We have met the enemy, and they are ours," Perry wrote laconically
+to Congress, while the United States went wild with joy, and
+Washington Irving writing what his countrymen believed, said, "The
+last roar of the cannon that died along Lake Erie's shore was the
+expiring note of British domination on this continent."
+
+But Canada didn't see it that way.  Her people were sorry for the
+loss of the fleet, with the guns they could not possibly replace--and
+more sorry when Detroit fell, and two thousand more were added to the
+British prisoners of war in the States; but they thought it no reason
+for them to "give up the ship."  So, while American newspapers raged
+against their stubbornness, they went on fighting as if nothing had
+happened.
+
+Perhaps the results of the battle were more felt in England than
+Canada.  There men realized that Perry's victory was really the
+victory of the best seaman, and it made them inclined to consider the
+wisdom of coming some day to an understanding with this arrogant
+young Republic, who seemed willing--and perhaps was able--to meet
+them on the seas they looked on as their own.
+
+An American letter brought the news at last to York.  It was to Bee,
+and told of Edgar being again a prisoner of war, and that Eli,
+seriously wounded in the lake fight, had been brought to Newark, and
+wanted his sister to come to him.  So Bee and Betty, with the baby,
+and Chloe, and Mrs. Ferguson, sailed across Ontario.  Betty was glad
+that it was not to Kingston; she was relieved at Bee's quiet
+acceptance of the plan to marry her cousin (as she supposed) but she
+did not want to hurry the marriage.  Let Vere show himself to be a
+man indeed before this child was given him, she thought.
+
+Bee had forgotten marriage all those weeks that her brother was in
+danger.  She told him, "I can't marry an Englishman or Canadian, when
+they are trying to kill you."
+
+"I'm not dead yet, Bee, and our father gave you to the Edgars, for
+your grandfather to claim, if he liked, because our mother was
+English.  But who is wanting to marry you?"
+
+Bee evaded the question, not feeling ready to tell him of Ned yet.
+She wondered where he was, fighting for his country, that was half
+hers, and to clear his name.
+
+* * *
+
+As for Ned, he was back at Stoney Creek again, hearing that
+over-cautious commanders had again ordered Vincent to retreat to
+Kingston, but instead Vincent was staying there, and sending the
+regiment that Ned had come out with, on the "Lightfoot".  Murray, its
+colonel, was to fortify Twenty-mile Creek (now St. Catherines) and do
+all he could to "annoy the enemy" then holding Niagara.
+
+Ferguson would go with the regiment, and the people of Stoney Creek,
+who had grown very attached to the soldier-preacher, and who thought
+Murray's advance foolhardy, as the Americans had six thousand in
+Niagara, came to church, to hear, as one pessimist said--"Mr.
+Ferguson preach his own funeral sermon."
+
+Ferguson had overheard the words, and he repeated them as he stood,
+for the last time, in his scarlet regimentals, in the pulpit at
+Stoney Creek.  Then he added in a voice that rang with all the power
+of a strong man's faith: "You may hear of George Ferguson falling on
+the field, but he will not be dead.  You have it from his own lips
+that all is well with him.  The sting of death is removed, and I know
+that if this tabernacle of my body be dissolved, I have a building of
+God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens."
+
+* * *
+
+Murray, carefully reckless, did annoy the enemy very much.  McClure
+who commanded at Niagara, demanded more men to crush the enemy who
+was continually attacking his foraging parties.  The American
+newspapers loudly declared that "It is a mistake to keep the war in
+Upper Canada.  We could take Lower Canada without soldiers.  We have
+only to lead officers into the lower province, and the disaffected
+people will rise round our standard."
+
+Winter came early that year and two armies were preparing to invade
+Lower Canada.  Hampton, with five thousand men, was ordered to bring
+stores by way of Lake Champlain and meet Wilkinson.  This last
+general, with nine thousand men, was to run the rapids of the St.
+Lawrence, and make a dash for Montreal.  Kingston would not dare,
+they thought, to diminish her scanty garrison by sending men down the
+river.  Lake Champlain had been stripped of troops to aid Upper
+Canada, and Montreal had only a few hundred regulars.  Every thing
+depended on the Lower Canada militia.
+
+Late that October the French-Canadians came out.  They blocked every
+road that Hampton could take, and at Chateauguay, under De Salaberry,
+on October twenty-fifth, an army entirely of militia and Indians
+ambushed in the woods, so demoralized Hampton's army, that he decided
+it was impossible to get through with his heavy baggage, and
+retreated.
+
+Cold and much snow came with November, but Wilkinson did not mean to
+stop.  On November fifth, the startled scouts on the Canadian side
+saw one of the most dramatic scenes of the whole war.  Between its
+snow-covered banks the St. Lawrence was storming black through the
+Galops Rapids, the first below Kingston, and down that rush of dark
+water, flecked with spurts of white foam, hundreds of bateaux,
+splendidly handled, were shooting one after another, laden with
+thousands of blue-coated men.
+
+But Kingston did not intend to remain idle.  She sent eight hundred
+men with a battery, to do anything they could.  They fired on, and
+followed the bateaux, which suffered some loss.  The enemy being
+delayed by want of provisions, and the landing parties sent out to
+forage, found to their dismay that the French-Canadian farmers had
+fled, burning what stores they could not take with them, and driving
+off their cattle.
+
+On November tenth, the invaders, suffering much with cold and hunger,
+had most of their force down the Long Sault.  Two thousand men were
+still above that great rapid, when a terrific fire was opened on them
+from the bank.  The only thing to do was to land and dislodge the
+enemy.  So was fought the battle of Chrysler's Farm.  Eight hundred
+men with two cannon, poured a hot fire from behind the stone farm
+fences, then rushed out, and charged the invaders with flashing
+bayonets.  Leaving many behind them, the Americans retreated in
+confusion to the boats, and ran the rapids.  Wilkinson had just heard
+of Hampton's defeat, and as his men were starving, and the fights at
+Chrysler's and Chateauguay had taught him the kind of "welcome" he
+would get from Lower Canada, he retired entirely.
+
+* * *
+
+An old gray-headed man had command of the tiny battery at
+Chrysler's--Sir John Haslem--and after the victory he went on to
+Montreal, where Vere, now a lieutenant, was stationed.  Since Vere's
+escape through Ned's condemnation, he had lived carefully, attending
+to his duties, and very hard on the failings of those under him.
+
+"Can't be medium in anything," grumbled Sir John as he stood in a
+Montreal ball-room on Christmas evening watching Vere dancing with a
+pretty French-Canadian girl.  "A year ago he was slackness itself,
+now he seems to delight in detecting and punishing slackness in
+others."
+
+"He'll die by a shot from his own men in some battle," said the man
+he spoke to, to himself, adding aloud, "Hullo, what's the matter?"
+
+The music had stopped and a man coming in called to Vere: "Hell's
+broke loose on the Niagara frontier, and we're to leave for there
+to-night."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+  How Ned Won the "Bubble Reputation", at
+  the Cannon's Mouth.
+
+Betty thought of hell, the hell of man's inhumanity to man, as she
+stood by her window in Newark, looking down a street of fire.  From a
+hundred roofs red flames were bursting.  Blue-coated men rushed out
+of smoke-shrouded doors with their arms full of plunder.  Outside in
+the deep snow and bitter cold, a crowd of women and children moved
+about aimlessly, or stood still as if stupefied by the sight of the
+ruin round them.
+
+[Illustration: "Outside in the bitter cold a crowd of women and
+children moved about aimlessly."]
+
+The Americans had feared to stay in bitterly hostile Niagara after
+navigation had stopped, and they could not be helped by their fleet.
+Sooner than risk a winter siege there, they had blown up Forts George
+and Erie and were then burning Newark by way of retaliation.
+
+Betty waited to see what their fate was to be.  Sentries at her door
+kept the women from going out or the plunderers from coming in.  At
+last Eli, who had almost recovered, came back--"This house will be
+spared," he told her formally, "I have represented it as the home of
+my sister, an American, and I came to tell you, you can take in whom
+you like.  There are one hundred and fifty families homeless, but you
+may have room for the sick.  I will see the house is guarded."
+
+"You will find this burning of Newark is worse than a crime, it is a
+blunder," exclaimed Betty, and in his heart Eli agreed with her,
+though he said nothing.
+
+The black, far-rolling smoke of Newark, gave the alarm at Twenty Mile
+Creek, and over nine hundred men--the old Irish regiment of the
+"Lightfoot", with a goodly number of Canadians added to its
+ranks--marched hot-foot to rescue, or avenge, if wrong had been done.
+The Americans had all crossed the river, and the sight of the burnt
+and plundered homes roused even Ferguson to militancy.
+
+The men were set to work; they roughly roofed the cellars to make
+shelters for the women and children, and threw up hasty ramparts on
+the ruins of Fort George for themselves.  Then the Niagara militia, a
+thousand raging men, came in, with their Indian allies after them.
+Murray, the colonel, had no artillery, and very little food, and if
+large supplies of food, blankets and other supplies were not procured
+soon, the victims of Newark must starve and freeze in their cellars.
+
+"And the only place we can get supplies is from the enemy--across
+there."  Ned was standing by the Niagara River as he spoke, to Tim.
+
+"And a sweet little stream it certainly is," answered the Irishman.
+
+It was night, and huge fires of logs blazed all along the American
+side, throwing a lurid glow across the dark rapid water, and the
+ghostly cakes of ice that whirled by.  By the snow-covered banks the
+ice was continually forming, and being broken off as constantly by
+the swift flowing river.
+
+"It sure will be lovely navigating to cross it," continued Tim, "and
+do you know what we shall be up against on the other side?"
+
+"Two thousand men at Buffalo," Ned answered.  "And four hundred at
+Fort Niagara, which has stone bastions, and the best guns on the
+river.  A hundred men could easily hold it against a thousand."
+
+For seven nights the log fires threw their search-lights across the
+river, and armed patrols watched, but they saw no movements on the
+Canadian side.  On the eighth night, the river was dark.  Leonard,
+commander of Fort Niagara, having ascertained the British had no
+artillery, and feeling sure they would not attempt to cross the
+dangerous river, drew in his pickets, for it was a bitter night.
+
+On the Canadian side there was a quiet stir among the men waiting
+savagely by the ashes of Newark, a crouching lion.
+
+The regiment marched silently out of the ruined town and up the
+river.  Not a word was allowed to be spoken, and commands were passed
+down the ranks in whispers.  Ferguson and Ned were together again as
+they entered the boats, which crept across the black river with
+muffled oars, the tense excitement of the men keeping them from
+feeling the cold.  And distant and menacing sounded the deep thunder
+of Niagara.
+
+They landed, unseen, at Youngstown, three miles above Fort Niagara.
+Here was the American hospital with its fill of wounded men.
+Noiselessly the buildings were surrounded, and a party entered, the
+sight of the hated redcoats telling the alarmed patients they were
+prisoners.  Two brave men, convalescents, did not submit.  Ready to
+die on the chance of being able to give the alarm, one sprang up the
+wide chimney, but was dragged back, promptly and roughly.  The other
+leaped from a window, but was overtaken.
+
+"We must go on, to get food and clothes for Newark," said Ferguson in
+a low earnest voice, "but, remember, men, for every deed we do
+to-night we must answer to God our Judge."  He went on speaking
+quietly as boat after boat touched shore, and the men crowded near
+him, listening in respectful silence, till the word of command sent
+them moving silently along the road to Fort Niagara.
+
+No one saw them, but a man had gone ahead of them--Sells, the
+deserter.  He had been stealing cattle on the Canadian side, till the
+retreat, when he followed the Americans across the river.  Now he
+came swiftly to the fort gate on his crunching snowshoes, urging the
+immediate lighting of the "search-lights" along the river.  "I know
+the English way," he said to the sergeant-major, who came out between
+the massive walls to see what he had to say.  "They'll fool 'round
+making mistakes, till the enemy do something like you did at Newark,
+then they'll get serious-mad.  Nothing will stop them, and I
+shouldn't wonder if they're not crossing the river now."
+
+"You're scared of them British; I'm not," said the American with an
+oath.  "If they cross on a night like this it'll be because they can
+walk on the water."
+
+Sells glided away, not many minutes before the forlorn hope--a
+hundred men with scaling ladders, crept round to the back of the fort
+where the grim eighteen pounders frowned.  Percy led them, his
+colonel knowing that in spite of his affected indolence, his
+thoughtful kindness to his men made him a leader whom the warm
+hearted Irish would have followed to certain death.
+
+With the thought of burnt Newark firing his blood and steeling his
+nerves, Ned followed Percy, climbing, scrambling, and slipping in the
+ghostly snow light, up the ladders and across icy, snow-laden roofs.
+The sentries were surprised at their posts, and captured or killed
+before they could give the alarm.  And there was no stir in the main
+buildings of the fort, as the reckless assaulters dropped into the
+dark courtyard.
+
+Leonard, the commander, had his quarters at the village, but most of
+the officers were in their mess-room playing whist.  "What's trumps?"
+one asked.
+
+The room door swung open--"British bayonets, I think, gentlemen,"
+said Percy, quietly, and the startled men knew they were prisoners.
+
+The main body, led by their colonel, and with Ferguson among them,
+had seized the outer works before the main gate, capturing the
+sentries, who gave them the password, which enabled them to reach the
+gate of the inner fort without their presence being known.  The
+bitter cold of the night kept every one in their warm quarters, with
+every door and window closed.
+
+The minutes seemed endless hours as they waited then, for the signal
+that would show their friends were within.  Then a single shot rang
+out, followed by a scattering musket fire, and a tumult of
+noise--shouting men, English cheers, and the screams of the women in
+the married quarters, mingling with the sound of running feet.
+
+Like hounds unleashed the waiting men went forward, carrying the gate
+with a rush--the leaders asking themselves if the little advance
+guard had been able to capture the yard batteries.  If not, in a
+minute the deadly six pounders would open on the mass of the invaders
+penned within the high yard walls.
+
+But with their officers prisoners, the bewildered Americans had only
+fired from their barrack windows at the redcoats running across the
+snowy yard.  Many of them fell, but a dozen were beside the coveted
+guns, when the main force surged through the gate.
+
+Ned, feeling strangely breathless and giddy with a bullet in his
+side, sat on the ground behind the guns, as his wildly cheering
+friends came in.  They charged the barracks, where every window was
+ablaze with rifle fire.  And from somewhere behind, a score of blue
+clad men dashed on the guns, fighting hand to hand with their
+defenders.
+
+"Hold the guns," said the young English lieutenant.
+
+"Hold the guns, for five minutes," cried Ned springing up, forgetting
+wounds.  The pieces were covered with a tangle of fiercely fighting
+men, but they were not fired.
+
+Ned remembered being struck down with a clubbed rifle, and with a
+last effort threw himself on the nearest gun, clinging desperately to
+its breech.  There was a blank, then some one was trying gently to
+drag his arms apart.  He resisted for the moment, and Tim's voice
+said coaxingly, "If you're not killed entirely, leave go to oblige
+me.  I've got to carry you out of this, and it'll break my heart sure
+if you want me to take that gun you seem so attached to as well."
+
+Ned relaxed limply, and was carried in to where the wounded of both
+armies lay, with Ferguson and a few helpers doing the little they
+could for them, as the surgeons had not yet come up.  The fort was in
+quiet possession of the English.  Only the women, to whom no one paid
+any attention, still screamed dismally--"The British and the Indians!
+They'll murder us!  They'll scalp us all!"
+
+A redcoated sentry stood by the gate, the color of his uniform not
+visible to the man who galloped up.  Leonard had heard the few shots
+fired, and supposing there was a riot in the garrison rode up to see
+to it.  Challenged by the sentry, he gave the countersign, and was
+instantly ordered to dismount.
+
+"You thundering blockhead," cried the enraged American.  "Can't you
+see I am the commanding officer?"
+
+"Dismount, sir," repeated the man as he levelled his musket, "I am a
+British soldier."
+
+The dumfounded officer obeyed, and was escorted to the slightly
+wounded English colonel, to whom he formally surrendered the fort.
+
+"Sure, and this is the lucky day of my life," exclaimed Tim as he
+suddenly entered the hospital.  "There'll be promotions for those who
+are looking for them, and plunder for the lot of us.  For the love of
+Heaven somebody give me a sack.  They've unlocked the stores, and we
+can plunder till daylight.  There's food enough for twenty armies,
+and heaps of merchandise sorts of things, that'll sell for a lot in
+Upper Canada now--needles and pins and everything.  It's too bad that
+even a heretic priest can't plunder."
+
+Ferguson's helpers all followed Tim as he went off with his sack, and
+Ned roused himself from the dull aching stupor that wrapped his
+senses.  "Don't stay here just for me," he said faintly to the
+Methodist, "This isn't like plundering private property."
+
+"You heard what Tim said," smiled Ferguson, "I must live up to my
+priestly reputation, though I would like to take something, this
+time, for I am a poor man, yet it wouldn't do."
+
+Morning came; the quartermaster took possession of all the stores
+that were not in the sacks of Tim and his comrades, and Dr. Tam was
+at his ghastly work of probing and operating--for this was before the
+mercy of chloroform.  Ned, waiting his turn on the surgeon's terrible
+table, heard Ferguson saying to the colonel--"We need, sir, to show
+by our lives, our gratitude to God for the mercy of our victory last
+night; for it was a most foolhardy venture."
+
+The officer looked at the fortifications, as he answered, "Yes,
+Ferguson, that's true.  And I ought to be a better man than I am, I
+know; so thank you kindly for your advice."
+
+Then the colonel entered the hospital to ask Dr. Tam's permission to
+speak to Ned before he passed under the surgeon's hands; and his
+words were a tonic that helped the young soldier through the ordeal
+of having his exhausted, fevered body probed for the ball in his
+side.  He had won his commission, and when he left hospital it would
+be as an officer--an ensign.
+
+Prisoners, plunder, wounded, and even the smaller guns, were all
+carried across the river that day, and the most daring and successful
+raid of the war was ended by serving out food and blankets to the
+people of Newark.
+
+But as soon as Canadian Niagara knew of the capture of the fort,
+another raid had been made.  The militia and Indians had crossed the
+river and flung themselves furiously on the enemy's countryside.
+Fortunately the people had all fled up to Buffalo, but Lewiston,
+Youngstown, and three other villages below the Falls were fired, and
+everything found was carried off.  Very unwillingly the raiders
+obeyed Murray's signal for their recall to their own side of the
+river.  He expected the force from Buffalo would be coming down to
+cut them off, but the Americans made no attempt to cross the river.
+
+After nearly two weeks of delirium and fever, Ned awoke in a
+wonderfully comfortable bed, in Betty's house in Newark, which had
+been requisitioned as a hospital, and the first thing he saw was
+Ferguson being carried in, his drawn face showing that he was
+suffering greatly.
+
+"It is an answer to prayer," said the Methodist faintly, "God is very
+good to me."
+
+"Cook was carrying a kettle of boiling water across the yard, and
+slipped down, and threw it all on a sentry's feet, which sentry was
+Ferguson, sir," one of the bearers explained to Dr. Tam, as he
+dressed the badly scalded feet.
+
+"It was a special providence," murmured Ferguson, "We had orders to
+go up the river, and crossing above the Falls, drive off the enemy's
+troops, which our scouts say, are badly disorganized and with no
+decent officers, and burn Black Rock and Buffalo.  I had a struggle
+in my mind as to what I should do.  It was not Christian to commit
+these greater enormities in retaliation for what we had suffered; so
+I cast my burden on the Lord, and He opened this way of escape."
+
+Ned made no response, and the Methodist added--"Did you quit
+belonging to us, because you thought religion was too unfashionable
+to profess, when you were called an officer and a gentleman?"
+
+"You had no right to say that to me," Ned cried, adding instantly,
+"No, no, but a man has wronged me, and I cannot forgive him, which
+you will not think Christian."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+  How Vere Came to Newark, and Bee
+  Consented to be Betrothed to Him.
+
+It was the last day of 1813 when the raid that Ferguson had escaped
+joining was made, and Buffalo and Black Rock went up in flames.
+Fortunately the terrified inhabitants had fled, when their troops
+retreated--it is not very clear why--but everything they left was
+destroyed or carried off.  And so 1813 ended, with black ashes strewn
+on either side of Niagara River, and a blacker hate in the hearts of
+Americans and Canadians alike.
+
+Bee shivered, not with cold, but at the thought of the hate of war,
+as she left the house one brilliantly cold January day.  She meant to
+take a long sledge drive by herself, and think things over.  Like
+many others on both sides, the war hurt her cruelly, because in many
+ways it was so like a civil war.  Yet after seeing the burning of
+Newark, she could not blame the savage retaliation from the Canadian
+side, and she could not hate Ned, or Betty and Sir John, with whom
+her brother had been quite willing to leave her--"But," she thought,
+"I cannot possibly be happy, or think of marrying a Canadian till
+this war is over, without anyone I love getting killed."
+
+Then she saw Ned.  He had left the house for the first time, to try a
+short walk, but he had over-rated his strength, and he was
+staggering, when a cutter drew up beside him, and he looked into
+Bee's bright face, as she said--"Oh, dear, how foolish men are.  When
+you wanted to go out, why didn't you let someone know, and we would
+have taken you out.  Get in here now."
+
+"Just back to the house, please, Miss Bee," said Ned as he obeyed and
+sat down among the soft, thick furs.  "Your guardians would not allow
+you to be with me a moment, if they knew what you do of me--what I
+told you at York--Miss Bee, what are you doing?"
+
+For the wilful girl had let the spirited horse go, and they were
+flying out of ruined Newark, and away across the open country, where
+the keen air thrilled Ned like wine.  Her horse kept Bee's hands
+full, but she looked round at Ned for a moment as she spoke, and he
+wondered that he had never noticed how bright and soft her eyes were.
+"Listen," she said, "of course I never repeated what you told me, but
+I know Cousin Betty suspects something--I thought you must have
+written and told her--and she doesn't mind at all.  She said that
+women must always overlook a few things in a man, and I'm sure I can
+overlook you being accused of a crime you did not commit."
+
+Ned gasped, realizing that there was a big misunderstanding
+somewhere--but he was so desperately lonely.  Shut in with his
+secret, it was hard for him to refuse the sweet comradeship of this
+warm-hearted girl.
+
+"Miss Bee," he began gravely, "you must have mistaken Mrs. Haslem.  I
+believe Sir John will reach Newark to-day, and when he sees my name
+marked for honour, he may consent that I receive pardon for what I
+did not do; but I know I shall lose all other rewards; I shall
+doubtless be allowed to fight in the ranks till the end of the war,
+and afterwards I can find something to do.  I know my father will
+never forgive me, and I will never go back to Dr. Brown with this
+stain on my name.  You should not ride out with me like this."
+
+Ned spoke with all the bitterness that had been fermenting in his
+brain so long, and with his hot hands clenched under the furs.  Then
+a small hand, that was cool and very firm was suddenly laid on them,
+and its touch calmed Ned strangely--"You know very well that I will
+be your friend till death," said Bee Goode.
+
+Behind them at Newark, Sir John and Vere had arrived, and the baronet
+sent Vere off to find Bee, while he talked over Ned's case with the
+Niagara officers.
+
+Vere rode off, greatly disturbed to know that Ned had not deserted
+with Sells, and dropped forever out of his world.  He hated him with
+all his weak, unwholesome nature, and then he saw him, in the sledge
+with the girl his grandfather had determined he should marry.
+
+In a moment he was beside them, shouting with an oath--"I thought
+your dirty American blood would show some time, you minx!  What spy
+work are you plotting with this deserter?"
+
+[Illustration: "Take that! you coward!"]
+
+Instantly Bee was on her feet, and with the strength of anger, struck
+him across the face with her whip--"Take that, you coward," she
+cried, "and never dare to speak to me again."  Then turning her horse
+she drove home in a storm of jangling bells and flying hoofs.
+
+She left Ned at the hospital door, and went to find Chloe waiting
+with her one silk dress--blue with a white flower pattern.
+
+"Missy must dress up fine to-night," said the old nurse.  "Mr. Vere
+is here, the gentleman who is to marry you, honey."
+
+Bee thought Chloe was mad for a moment, but when the woman repeated
+what Betty had told her, she understood the mistake she had made at
+York.
+
+"But I won't dress, I'll stay in my room, and lock the door while
+that cowardly liar is in the house," she cried.  "And to-night we
+will run away, you and I to my brother."
+
+"We can't, honey," said Chloe sympathetically.  "There's miles of
+snow and burnt houses, and soldiers who would stop us, and that
+almighty wild river that nobody can't get over nohow.  Let me dress
+you, honey, and make you look pretty, then you can go down and ask
+Mr. Percy to help you--he's here now."
+
+Percy had not seen Bee since he left her, a slip of a girl, to go on
+to York, a year before, and for an instant he hardly recognized this
+silk-robed, pale-faced young woman, with her haughty poise, and
+flashing eyes.  Then she was speaking to him, passionately and
+impulsively, repeating what Ned had told her at York, until he said,
+so sternly that she started at him--"That's enough, Bee, this is the
+first time you have shown yourself untrue to the Haslem name, let it
+be the last.  Vere has his faults, but no man of our family could be
+a coward or lie."
+
+"My name is Goode, sir," said Bee, at white heat now, "and I am sorry
+that I am half a Haslem if their family pride makes them blind to the
+vices of a relative.  Sir, I demand that you send me across to my
+brother--to my father's people."
+
+"Bee!" exclaimed Betty aghast, but Percy, after a keen look at the
+girl, said slowly and sternly--"I have just come from considering Ned
+Edgar's case.  If he admits to having been afraid to deliver the note
+at York, we can pardon his panic--seeing what his record has been
+since--on his first day under fire, unless he persists in this
+attempt to smirch the name of another man."
+
+Bee read a threat to Ned in the emphasis Percy put on his last words,
+and she forgot herself, thinking of Ned's possible danger.  Then in
+came Sir John, furious, for Vere had given him his version of the red
+welt on his face, but the angry words on the old man's lips were
+checked as he saw the child he had left at York shot up into young
+womanhood--"Bless me," he exclaimed, "I didn't know you."
+
+She made a mocking little courtesy to him.  "My cousin did not know
+me either, it would seem, sir.  I met a sick soldier and was driving
+him home, when Vere met us and spoke insultingly to me; I hope sir,
+you will say I did right to strike him."
+
+"Bless me," Sir John repeated helplessly.  "I don't know what the
+world is coming to."
+
+He was relieved at hearing the summons to dinner then, the dinner
+which was to publicly announce the betrothal of Vere and Bee.  Such
+family arrangements for the marriage of young people who hardly knew
+one another were not uncommon then, and the guests did not pay
+particular attention to the sulky boy, who felt that he hated this
+"Yankee girl," as he called her in his heart, who had so openly shown
+that she was on his enemy's side.  And the girl herself, who in
+white-faced silence heard her grandfather's speech, felt trapped,
+believing that if she resisted it meant further injustice and
+suffering for Ned.
+
+The evening was almost over when Archy got Bee away by herself.  "I
+thought you would like to know about Ned," he said bluntly.  "He just
+wouldn't say anything, only that him or Vere Haslem was a blamed
+liar, and we could decide which it was."
+
+"What are you going to do with him?"
+
+"Because of what he did here, he will be pardoned for what he did, or
+didn't, at York."
+
+"Then you don't think he is guilty?"
+
+"Not so fast, young lady.  I don't know, and the only way to find
+out, is to wait and watch them both.  The liar will act the coward
+and lie again, sure."
+
+"You may have to wait a long time for that; and while you are
+watching both, you treat Vere Haslem as if he were innocent, and Ned
+as if he were guilty.  You are cruelly hard on him."
+
+"There's a heap of hard things in life; one of them is that the day
+we clear Ned, we break Sir John's heart."
+
+* * *
+
+And Bee, who remembered that she loved her grandfather, shivered.
+
+She had not expected to sleep that night, but health and youth
+asserted themselves and she rested well, and woke in the sunny
+morning feeling that somehow things could not be as bad as she had
+thought them in the night.  She was greatly helped to this
+comparative cheerfulness by a talk she heard under her window, where
+Ferguson was energetically telling Kawque, the Mohawk scout, the
+story of Ned and Vere.  The Indian grunted such emphatic assent to
+Ferguson's belief in his friend, that Bee was half comforted.  At
+least Ned had true friends.
+
+Ferguson's friendship was doubly warm now that he knew the reason for
+Ned's "backsliding", and it helped the boy through the ordeal of
+returning to his comrades, reduced in rank.
+
+Ferguson had ridden home with Percy that evening, and the men had
+scattered to their messes, busy getting supper and preparing for the
+night.  Each mess consisted of about a dozen men who divided the work
+among them, the non-commissioned officers always being exempt.  Ned,
+to whom no one had yet spoken, picked up a pail to fetch water,
+washing to take his part in the work before he was ordered to by the
+sergeant.  But Tim snatched the pail from him.
+
+"Me Swaddler friend," he said earnestly, "unless you are wishful to
+go back to hospital immediate, you won't try to work round this mess."
+
+Perplexed, Ned looked at his sergeant, but that man only said,
+"Better put off arguing with Tim for a few years, Ned, you haven't
+the weight to stand up to him yet."
+
+So Ned knew he had been tried and acquitted by a very powerful
+court--the opinion of the men among whom he lived.  After hearing of
+Ned's condemnation at Kingston the regiment had talked of nothing
+else for a week.  They had also compared notes with a company just
+arrived, and decided which man had lied.  Now with rough delicacy
+they let Ned know what their verdict had been, and that they knew his
+reduction was only temporary.
+
+* * *
+
+Betty had moved to St. Davids, a village by Queenston Heights, where
+Percy and Sir John came often, and Vere seldom.  He managed to find
+duties, any duties, to keep him from meeting the fiancée he now
+detested.  And still Sir John delighted in Bee's brightness, and
+believed that in practically forcing her to marry Vere he was doing
+the best for the girl he really loved, and for the family whose
+honour was rooted in his heart.
+
+Spring came, and there was some skirmishing on Lake Ontario.  Erie
+was entirely in American hands.  But on land there were only a few
+raids by the Americans, who had a new general, Winfield Scott, who
+was carefully training the army with which he meant to take Upper
+Canada that summer.  If he did not, he well knew Canada would not be
+taken at all, for England was making peace with France.  Earnestly
+Canadians were praying that peace might be made with the United
+States also, though they were as ready as ever to fight if the
+American flag should again be carried across their border by armed
+men.
+
+A breathless June evening Bee stood alone in Betty's garden, thinking
+that July was very near, and feeling desperately afraid.  Betty had
+spoken to her very decidedly--"Of course you will marry Vere in three
+weeks."  To herself she said, "The boy is steady enough now, and this
+wretched business of Ned Edgar's refusing to take back his shameful
+lie that Vere never gave him the letter, makes it all the more
+necessary that we should stand by him."
+
+Alone in the hot June dusk Bee shivered.  She was too young and too
+affectionate to be able to defy Sir John and Betty, and as she
+helplessly prayed for some one who could advise her, a man who walked
+noiselessly as an Indian, came beside her, and she held out her hands
+to him with a little cry of joy.  "Papa Edgar; you have escaped!  But
+you are so thin!"
+
+"Prisons aren't palaces," said Edgar indifferently, "In the winter
+there was no fire and in the summer no air, below decks, where we
+were.  We lay on the bare planking.  But down in Montreal harbour,
+our prisoners were on similar other prison hulks so I had nothing to
+complain of--it was the fortune of war.  At last Tahata came one
+night and helped me to escape."
+
+Edgar bore his enemies no grudge for his rough prison--he lived in a
+rough age--it was really the memory of Ned that had aged him, and he
+tried fiercely to stop Bee when she mentioned his name.  He still
+thought him with Sells the deserter.  But the girl insisted on
+telling him all, and the light of her faith in his son kindled hope
+in his heart again.  Ned might be, nay, must be, soon proved
+innocent.  Then another thought made him exclaim, "But you must not
+marry this villain, child."
+
+"You will help me not to, sir," said Bee confidently as she clung to
+him, and Edgar frowned to himself.  He was on duty, scouting with his
+Indians, and he had snatched only a moment to speak to his one-time
+ward.  He knew he was helpless to aid her; he could not possibly take
+her from the Haslems.  Then among the bushes he saw the dark face of
+Kawque the scout.
+
+Kawque was to stay at St. Davids, and used to quick thinking and
+daring action, Edgar spoke reassuring farewell as on sudden impulse
+he went to the Indian.
+
+The first thing he had meant to tell the Mohawk was unnecessary.
+Kawque was quite sure already of Ned's innocence, and Edgar looked
+visibly younger as he heard what Kawque could tell him--"Blessings on
+that Methodist after all," he thought, then spoke earnestly to the
+Indian about Bee.  Kawque nodded; he never wasted words.
+
+"Bee Goode not marry till you say so, all right," he said decidedly.
+
+And so Edgar went off, not stopping to think that the methods of an
+Iroquois warrior in preventing a formally arranged aristocratic
+wedding might prove startling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+Kawque Takes a Hand in the Game.
+
+It was the morning of Sunday, July 3, 1814; Ferguson was preaching in
+Warner's Chapel (the third Methodist church erected in Upper Canada),
+at St. Davids, when, like a hideous spectre of advancing war, Kawque
+stood in the doorway, half-naked, and frightful in his war-paint.
+
+"The Longknives have crossed the river," he cried, for his hard black
+eyes picked Percy out among the congregation.  Gliding toward him, he
+gave him the note calling him to a council of war.  All the
+congregation were running out, the women to bury silver, and the men
+to prepare their arms in readiness for the summons which would soon
+call them out.
+
+Percy said a few words to his wife, then rode off, to look round as
+Ferguson trotted his mount after him--"You have not been sent for
+yet, Ferguson," said Percy, "and I wonder your religion lets you
+travel on Sunday when you are not compelled to."
+
+"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, sir."
+
+"Oh, certainly have it your own way, but now I want you to take my
+keys.  We are going to have the most desperate fighting of this war,
+and I have made you my executor in my will.  You can see that my
+trunk, now at Fort George, goes to Mrs. Haslem, some plate and a
+considerable sum in gold are in it."
+
+That Sunday morning seven thousand Americans entered the Niagara
+peninsula, and supported by the gun boats of Lake Erie, took Fort
+Erie.  Their plans were to surround and capture the army of the
+defence--instead of chasing it into the bush--also taking Fort
+George.  Then with the co-operation of the Lake Ontario fleet they
+meant to seize and fortify Burlington Heights.  The plan was a good
+one, but to keep it from being carried out, were fourteen hundred
+regulars, sixteen hundred militia, and three hundred Indians,
+stationed in Niagara itself.  Behind them, Burlington and York had
+been stripped of men to make their numbers what they were.  Behind
+them too, round Burlington and York were the ripening wheat fields,
+that must be saved unless Upper Canada was to be starved into
+surrender the next winter.  Kingston had sent her fleet to blockade
+Sackett's Harbour, and was herself blockaded by the American gun
+boats of Lake Ontario.  In Lower Canada the enemy had massed a huge
+army at Lake Champlain, and every available man and gun on the
+Canadian side had been called out to guard the roads to Montreal.
+
+On Monday evening, July fourth, Ned stood, once more a sentry, by
+Chippewa Creek, the little river that enters the Niagara a few miles
+above the Falls.  Two miles away was the enemy's camp, strongly
+entrenched with a breastwork of logs.  The British position was also
+good, among sheltering trees, with the rapid stream in front, crossed
+by only one bridge.  Both leaders were hoping the other would attack.
+
+It grew dark, and Ned, straining his ears to catch the sounds ahead,
+felt depressed.  He did not like the stories he had heard of the new
+Commander, the haughty Marquis of Tweedsdale, and the memory of all
+that he had been robbed of, came to him, hurting him fiercely.
+
+Then a dark, silent figure rose before him, and he challenged
+sharply.  It was Kawque, the scout, and as he had not the password
+Ned called for an escort to take him in.
+
+There was a noise of trampling horses, as Riall and Tweedsdale with
+their staff rode by.  They stopped when the scout was brought to
+them, and Ned heard Kawque's laconic report--"Long Knives too strong.
+Twice too many for you to attack.  Got thirty-six cannon."
+
+The two leaders spoke together, Riall apparently urging something on
+his companion to which Tweedsdale answered in his loud harsh
+voice--"Nonsense, these Yankees are a pack of untrained cowards.  Are
+we to sulk here for fear of a mob of scape-gallows and prison men?
+They will never stand against a bayonet charge."
+
+"That means we'll go out and attack, only cowards would want to wait
+here for them," Ned heard Vere's voice say gleefully, as the leaders
+rode on.  Ned's face darkened as his enemy passed, riding as if in
+triumph over him, and something more like a curse than a prayer rose
+to his lips.
+
+"Why not shoot him?" Kawque whispered softly in the young sentry's
+ear, "You hate, eh? for he took these"--he touched Ned's sleeve where
+the sergeant's stripes had been--"they were to you as the scalps you
+had taken with your hand from the enemy."
+
+"Shooting's too good for the cur," said Ned fiercely, adding, angry
+with himself, "Get out of here, Kawque, you've no business hanging
+'round talking to me."
+
+Kawque went off, thinking, "Shooting's too good, eh?  he means he
+wants to kill slowly."
+
+Alone again, Ned repeated his fierce prayer for vindication.
+
+In the morning of July fifth, the English drums beat to arms, and
+soon after, twelve hundred regulars in three solid columns, with
+Tweedsdale leading, crossed the Chippewa, strict orders being given
+that the men must reserve their fire until command.
+
+There was, however, a sharp rattle of musketry fire from both sides.
+The Canadian militia were crouching behind stumps, and crawling
+through the long grass in front of the English position, and as the
+columns moved forward, Ned marching by Ferguson, recognized Archy
+directing the movements of his men.  Though Ned did not know it,
+Edgar had also reached the camp the night before, and was now behind
+with the Indians.  The demands of war had not allowed him to seek his
+son.
+
+Suddenly Ferguson looked up, shouting joyously--"Glory to God, I am
+saved."
+
+Percy, walking a little in advance, looked back, and smiled.  "What's
+the matter now, Ferguson?"
+
+"Glory to God," repeated the lively Methodist, "my soul is so happy."
+
+"I suppose that means that you know you will be killed to-day and so
+reach Heaven?"
+
+"No, sir, I won't fall to-day, but I am assured I shall be wounded."
+
+"Oh, you have it all arranged, I see.  I hope it wasn't against your
+conscience to ask that you might get a light one."
+
+Archy kneeling by a log, looked up as they passed.  "Guess that's why
+you fellows don't think you need be afraid of anything," he shouted,
+"seeing you've got a real live Methodist preacher in your ranks."
+
+The three little columns were out in the open now, their close
+formation, and the bright scarlet of their uniforms, making it almost
+impossible for the enemy's marksmen to miss a shot.  They had broken
+into a run, with their bayonets flashing, when the Americans, loading
+with buckshot and cartridges, swept their front ranks with a death
+blast of fire.
+
+Ned saw Percy stagger, and Ferguson spring to his side.  For a moment
+Percy leaned heavily on the soldier, then steadied himself, changing
+his sword to his left hand, as he called to his men.  None faltered;
+they halted at the word of command, to fire, then dashed on again,
+till only a hundred yards from the enemy, who were holding their
+fire--till then.
+
+Then again death flashed from the unseen rifles, and now the
+invader's cannon spoke also, belching forth death.  When the smoke
+cleared the brave scarlet lines were gone, only scattered groups were
+on the field, but not till the bugles behind them called "retreat",
+did they turn to go back, and they carried most of their wounded with
+them.
+
+Amid the terrible fire that stopped them, Ned saw Ferguson's musket
+fall from his hand, and his friend's right arm hang useless.  Still
+the Methodist kept his place till they all turned.  He was nearly
+fainting from loss of blood when they re-crossed the Chippewa, and
+Ned was able to bandage his arm roughly with a silk handkerchief.
+The bone was not broken, but badly grazed by a ball that had passed
+through it just below the elbow, and it held possibilities of danger
+if not dressed properly by a surgeon.  But no surgeon had come with
+the army, which was now in all the confusion of breaking camp.
+Tweedsdale's reckless, foolish charge had cost five hundred out of
+the twelve who made it, and Riall was afraid of the Americans
+attacking his sorely diminished force.  They did not, however, for
+they had no idea of the smallness of his numbers, nor the extent of
+his loss.  The British were now in hurried retreat, to the heights of
+Queenston, dragging their cannon, and with their wounded in wagons.
+It was an excessively hot day.  In the excitement of the fighting,
+and the hurry of starting off, no one had time to think of thirst,
+but now as they marched along, within sight and sound of an inland
+ocean of fresh water roaring through the upper rapids, they, and
+especially the wounded, suffered frightfully for water.  And because
+just above the rapids the enemy's gun boats were watching, the men
+were ordered not to leave their ranks in the shelter of the woods.
+
+"A curse on their orders," gasped a soldier by Ned, whose face was as
+red as his coat.  "I'm a going to have a drink if I die for it."
+
+He made a dash for the river, a stone's throw.  An officer called to
+him angrily to come back instantly, but crazed with thirst, he only
+yelled out an oath, knelt down to drink at the water's edge--and the
+next moment was downed by an American bullet.  No one else tried to
+reach the river, though they stared at the water with tortured eyes,
+as they trudged along in the heat.
+
+Many of the wounded were raving in delirium.  Ferguson, too weak to
+walk, was suffering torments jolted along in the rough wagon.
+"Water," he panted at last, half unconscious, "A mouthful of water!"
+
+Percy, whose injured shoulder did not prevent him from riding on his
+horse, came to the side of the wagon, as he heard him.  "Take a
+little rum from my flask," he urged, offering it, and the Methodist
+took it--the only time in his military life when he tasted liquor.
+
+At midnight the sullen army reached St. Davids.  Percy took the
+exhausted Ferguson to his wife, to stay, while he rode on to the
+hospital at Fort George.  The army passed St. Davids, and entrenched
+itself at Queenston, where it waited, on very short rations, and
+wondering why the enemy did not come on.
+
+But the Americans did not wish to leave the support of the Lake Erie
+gun boats until they were sure their Ontario fleet were in Niagara
+River.  Ned was at Queenston, while Edgar was still with the Indians,
+who were acting as pickets in the woods near the Falls.
+
+Two days after the battle, Vere rode to St. Davids, and as he spoke
+to Betty, Indian scouts ran through the village, calling that the
+Americans were coming, destroying the country as they came.  Cattle
+and poultry were killed and burnt, fields and gardens trampled down.
+Only dwelling houses with women and children in them were untouched.
+
+Ferguson was in no condition to travel, but as to stay meant the
+prison-hulks at Sackett's Harbour, he went off through the woods,
+guided by Kawque.  Vere had his horse, but leaving it with Chloe for
+a minute he ran up to the room the Fergusons used.  From its window
+he saw an American patrol riding in, and picking up a rifle he fired
+at them, emptying a saddle.  Then leaping downstairs, he mounted and
+tore down the road.
+
+Ten minutes later, the house was surrounded, and its occupants
+questioned by an angry American officer.  "I can see there have been
+men in this house," he said to Betty.  "Now unless you will tell me
+which roads they took through the woods, I shall hold you guilty of
+firing on my men."
+
+"You must know," Betty answered calmly, "that as a loyal Englishwoman
+I cannot give you any correct information, and as a Christian I
+cannot tell you anything false."
+
+To the credit of their blood, there is no instance of women being
+mishandled by the men of either side during the war in Canada, and
+the officer answered shortly, "In five minutes, if you do not speak I
+shall fire your house."
+
+"It is only what I must expect," said Betty, "but I pray you, sir,
+watch that the fire does not spread.  Everything is so hot and dry."
+
+With nothing saved but the clothes they had on, Bee and Chloe with
+Betty and Mrs. Ferguson, who both held their children, stood on the
+road, not knowing which way to go, for the fire did spread, and every
+house in pretty St. Davids went down.
+
+Meanwhile of the two men who left St. Davids, Ferguson had been taken
+by Kawque safely to the Queenston lines, and Ned drove him to Fort
+George.  Evidently a bit of lead was still in his arm, for it was
+terribly swollen and painful, and almost black.  Ned had to go back
+at once, so he left Ferguson at the hospital--a horror of war.
+
+"You inexpressible idiot," roared the doctor.  "Why didn't you ask
+for me at once?  Thought others were worse than you, eh?  Well if you
+had not always lived as you have, this arm would have to come off at
+once, but now there's a chance."
+
+Meanwhile as Ferguson lay on his fevered bed, and the men at
+Queenston saw the smoke of St. Davids go up, Kawque going towards the
+Americans to scout, came across a trail which showed him that Vere in
+his hasty flight from St. Davids, had taken a wrong turning and gone
+into the deep bush.  A moment Kawque thought, then went swiftly after
+Ned's enemy, until a mêleé of horse and foot marks, and broken
+underbrush told him a struggle had taken place in the woods.  Vere
+had been captured, so much Kawque guessed, but his captors were not
+any Indians, the Mohawk knew, and yet he was sure the Americans had
+not advanced that far.
+
+Silently now as a snake, Kawque glided through the underbrush until
+he came to a hut, where men whom he recognized as Sell's gang,
+deserters from both armies, were standing round Vere, who with his
+hands tied behind him, was foaming with rage.
+
+Then a man in a ragged red coat--Sells himself--stepped forward, and
+laughed in his face--"I too was a gentleman once, until your damned
+grandfather had me flogged, at Kingston; I'd kill you now in revenge,
+only the Yankees are hotfoot after us--we did a bit of plundering
+among the Canucks--and the last man of us will be hanged if we can't
+give them the slip.  See here, the Yankee leader is Eli Goode; we
+know his sister's at St. Davids, with a nigger woman, and two of us
+are going there disguised as Indians to get her, and then I guess her
+brother will sing another tune.  It's up to you to tell us where she
+is."
+
+Vere had plenty of animal courage in the excitement of battle, but
+when he saw the preparations for his torture by the miscreants, his
+soul was afraid, yet he had enough English instinct to answer Sells
+bravely, with a curse, though the degenerate within him whispered,
+"Why suffer for a Yankee girl?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+How Bee was Abducted--and the End.
+
+A tornado of flame was sweeping over St. Davids, and women with their
+children stumbled through the burning, choking fog of smoke.  Betty's
+little household were still standing helplessly together by the ruins
+of their cottage, when two men, in the war-paint of the Mohawks,
+leaped out of the smoke, seized Bee, and vanished with her in the
+fog.  Chloe rushed after them screaming, while the other two women,
+cumbered with the babies they carried, could do nothing.
+
+Then more men, in Indian dress and paint, were round them, roughly
+demanding their names.  They were gone too, in the smoke and
+confusion, as some Americans rode up, and Betty implored them to
+rescue Bee.
+
+"Madam," said their officer coldly, "our Indians are still the other
+side of the river.  The Mohawk devils are in your pay, not ours.  You
+had better look among the British lines for the girl."
+
+For endless miles now, it seemed, Betty and Mrs. Ferguson tramped the
+hot roads, with the other refugees of St. Davids.  At last they
+reached Queenston, and Percy.  He himself had been about to set out
+for St. Davids with Dr. Tam, a wagon, and two men--Ned and Tim Kelly.
+The Americans had told them to send, under a flag of truce, and fetch
+the sick and injured from the burnt village.
+
+So they rode off, Ned stunned to think that Bee was abducted, and
+probably by men worse than any savages--Sells' gang of deserters.
+They heard nothing of Bee at St. Davids, though some of Sells' men
+had been seen near disguised as Indians, and an American company,
+with Eli Goode in command, was out searching for them.
+
+They were returning when Kawque met them; he first whispered to
+Ned--"Come and mock your enemy.  He is a prisoner in the woods, and
+you can taunt him, telling him he can never ride with the British
+soldiers again, for he whined when he thought Sells would torture
+him, and he told where Bee Goode was, that they might steal her."
+
+With his black eyes glittering, the Mohawk repeated his story to
+Percy, and without a word the four men left the wagon, and followed
+the Indian to the hut.  It was empty except for a man who lay bound
+face down on a bench, the upper part of his body covered with a
+blanket.  He did not seem conscious, but groaned deeply as Tim cut
+the ropes, and brought water.  Ned did nothing but look with loathing
+upon his enemy's disgrace.
+
+Percy took hold of the blanket to lift it, but Vere, speaking for the
+first time, though he kept his face hidden, cried, "Don't touch it.
+Don't touch me.  I can't bear it."
+
+"Dr. Tam is just behind us," said Percy.  Then signing the others to
+go out, he added fiercely, "and you betrayed Bee, to save your skin?"
+
+Vere cringed at the savagery in his tone.  "They burnt me for hours,"
+he whispered faintly.  "At last I did not know what I said."
+
+Percy moved back quickly to keep himself from striking a wounded man,
+then as Dr. Tam came in, he went out.  Ned was waiting to speak to
+him.  "We are wasting time, sir," he said crisply, "Kawque says he
+can follow Sells' trail, but he is afraid of being killed by the
+American soldiers if he goes alone and they capture him.  Will you
+let me go with him?  We can leave plenty of marks for Captain Goode
+to follow, and as she was only stolen this morning we might even be
+able to rescue her, before she is harmed."
+
+"Go certainly," said Percy in an unsteady voice, for his soul was
+sick at the thought of Vere's cowardice.
+
+With a gesture of farewell Ned turned from him, and followed Kawque
+into the bush.  Knowing that the only way to keep himself quiet and
+sane was to work hard, he set the pace through the brush at a rate
+that made Kawque look at him admiringly.  The Mohawk was a primitive
+man, he understood strength, but not weakness.
+
+Dr. Tam came out, and Percy asked--"Are his injuries likely to be
+fatal, doctor?"
+
+Dr. Tam smiled grimly.  "When I was a lad at college, Major Haslem,
+we had an awful way of initiating freshmen.  We ought to have been
+expelled for it.  We stripped the victim to his waist, and tied him,
+while we heated irons red-hot before his eyes, and told him we were
+going to do some fancy marking on his back with them.  Then we
+blindfolded him, and brought out some raw meat and sealing wax.  We
+dug the iron into the meat holding it at his back, for him to smell,
+and hear too, the flesh scorching under them, while we touched his
+skin with the hot wax--and I've known strong lads to faint away.
+Suggestion, just suggestion."
+
+"Doctor," cried Percy, irritably, "what are you telling me this for?"
+
+"Because Sells must have learnt some college hazing tricks.  That's
+what he did to our man in there.  Vere Haslem has a couple of skin
+burns that usually he wouldn't have sworn at for more than a minute.
+I kicked him, and told him to get up and put on his clothes."
+
+Vere was on his feet, dressed, and just fastening on his sword when
+Percy came in.  "Give that to me," the older man said.
+
+"When it is known you were not captured by the enemy," he continued,
+"you will be marked 'missing', and inquiries will be made.  You must
+stop here, and I will bring you plain clothes and money.  Then you
+can cross the river, and get to France as soon as you can.  You must
+take another name there, and I will see you are provided with funds.
+Kawque and Dr. Tam will tell all that happened here, and I will ask
+that the Court which condemned Ned Edgar at Kingston re-open the
+case, and consider what your word as a witness is worth."
+
+So the cup Vere had filled once for another, came back to him.
+Leaning against the side of the hut he saw the world of military
+trappings and music that his soul loved, slip away from him forever.
+
+* * *
+
+That evening, Edgar with Tahata, the Mohawk chief, and a dozen
+Indians, went recklessly out to seek for his son, and his one-time
+ward, Bee Goode.  At midnight they were challenged by an American
+picket, and Edgar went forward with a white handkerchief tied on his
+sword.  "I am looking for a girl whom Sells' gang has stolen," he
+said.  "If you will let us pass, I give you my word, to return and
+surrender as your prisoner, as soon as I have found her--Bee Goode."
+
+"Major Edgar," said Eli's voice in the darkness, "I think we can both
+forget the war for a little while--till we find Bee Goode.  I shall
+be very glad of your help, and we can go on together."
+
+For a week they pressed after the gang, wondering that they never saw
+a trace of the marks Ned and Kawque were to leave for them to follow.
+Edgar and Eli were afraid to put what they feared into words, but
+Tahata said bluntly--"We are on the Sells' gang trail, getting near
+him, yes; but Kawque never passed here; maybe him and Ned find Sells'
+camp first night, and creep in to get the girl, and--", Tahata
+finished his sentence with a significant gesture of his tomahawk.
+Edgar thought he would never see his son again, and an agony of
+remorse and sorrow swept over him.
+
+* * *
+
+It was a hot, dark night in the vast unexplored forest that covered
+all the country back of the lake fronts.  The allies, united to save
+Bee, Canadian, American, and Mohawk, were camped round their fire,
+and their chiefs, Edgar, Eli, and Tahata, sat apart in council.  Said
+Edgar--"We have found the man's stronghold, and he knows we are here,
+yet he does not send any word--evidently he does not hold Bee."
+
+"In other words," said Eli hoarsely, "she is dead in his hands before
+this, either by the mercy of God, or the--the handling of men."
+
+"We live, we are men, we can attack and do justice upon him," said
+Tahata the Mohawk, sententiously.
+
+[Illustration: "Then on the other side of the tree they saw her--or
+her spirit."]
+
+Then on the other side of the fire they saw her--or her spirit.  In
+the beaded buckskin bravery of an Indian belle, with white feathers
+in her hair, she smiled at them, still the light-hearted girl who had
+never received anything but knightly treatment from any man.  And
+behind her in the shadows they saw the faces of Ned, Chloe, and
+Kawque.
+
+"Papa Edgar, and Brother Eli, don't you know me?" she cried; and
+coming round the fire, she touched them with warm human hands,
+talking quickly as she told how after hearing Vere betray her, Kawque
+with a friend had rushed off to St. Davids.  The place was on fire,
+Sells was close behind and the Americans coming.  Kawque had no time
+to explain, he snatched the girl away, telling her who he was as
+Chloe caught up to them.  Then because they were cut off from getting
+to the English lines, the other Indian took Bee to the Mohawk village
+deep in the forest, leaving Kawque to tell Bee's friends; but wishing
+the unhappy Vere to bear the full weight of Percy's anger, the scout
+said nothing of Bee till he was alone in the bush with Ned.  Then
+they had gone to fetch the girl, and brought her after her brother's
+party.
+
+In silent thanksgiving Eli kissed his sister, and Edgar looked at
+Ned, standing up very straight in the fire-glow--"Will you--can you,
+shake hands?" he said huskily, holding out his own.
+
+Ned clasped it instantly, knowing that his honour among men was
+restored.
+
+Leaving Bee and Chloe carefully hidden, the men then went on to
+attack, capture--and dispose of Sells' gang, with the rough justice
+of the wild.
+
+It was Sir John of whom Bee was thinking when Eli came to tell her
+that he was about to start for the American lines.  Would she come
+with him, or stay, to be a Canadian, among Canadians?
+
+"Must you go," she said brokenly, "to fight Ned--and Papa Edgar?"
+There was white pain in her face, for like many another woman on the
+Canadian-American border, her heart was torn by the horror of this
+almost civil war.  She clung to him pathetically, as though afraid to
+let him go.
+
+"I must go to my grandfather," she half whispered.  "I know no one
+can comfort him now, still he did love me, and I must go to him."
+
+"Take care of her," said Eli briefly, as he left, and he looked at
+Ned, not Edgar.
+
+For a week Bee and her friends travelled through the thick bush, and
+then on Sunday, July twenty-fourth, they rested, hearing far-off the
+thunder of Niagara.  It was here that to the keen hearing of the
+Indians came the sound of church bells ringing a frantic alarm, and
+hastily they broke camp, to push on, guessing their meaning--a fresh
+advance of the invader.
+
+And away in Niagara Sir John was still in ignorance of his shame,
+although it was three weeks since Vere had disappeared.  Believing
+him to be a prisoner and comparatively safe, his whole anxiety was
+for his little grand-daughter.
+
+That torridly hot Monday afternoon, July twenty-fifth, Sir John sat
+on his horse, stiffly correct, in a little graveyard near the Falls.
+Behind was a gray church, and all round the cemetery ran a stone wall
+where berry bushes grew thick.  In front, the ground sloped down to a
+road--Lundy's Lane--with thick orchards of apple and peach on either
+side.
+
+The previous Sunday had been one of alarm in Niagara.  A week before
+the enemy had fallen back on Chippewa, and the British had followed
+as far as the Falls.  Then Winfield Scott managed to deceive them so
+completely as to his intentions, that Riall sent twelve hundred men
+under Drummond to Fort George.  Only sixteen hundred were still with
+him at Lundy's Lane; Sir John was watching as his little battery
+clattered in among the gravestones, and the guns took position where
+they could sweep the road.
+
+Then in came Fitzgibbons' men with their famous bush-fighting leader,
+and news--five thousand Americans were marching from Chippewa.  Riall
+ordered a retreat to Queenston, and half his force had started when
+the enemy came down Lundy's Lane.  It was an unpremeditated battle on
+both sides.  The British were trying to get away, and the enemy
+thought they were at Queenston.  Scott, however, attacked instantly,
+afraid they might escape into the bush, hurling his men up the hill
+to where the battle flag of England waved over the church, and the
+guns vomited death above the graves of the quiet dead.
+
+For half an hour the battery had the battle to itself.  The
+blue-coated men dashed forward, crouching behind the cemetery wall to
+fire a volley through the bushes, then springing across, rushed on
+the gunners.  Now the rest of the army were back in position, and the
+battle raged.  Men fired at men a stone's throw off their musket
+muzzles, or fought savagely hand to hand with clubbed guns and the
+deadly bayonet.
+
+Sir John was wounded.  Half-stunned, he was pulled from under his
+dead horse, and saw Percy.  "How goes it?" he murmured with faint
+eagerness.
+
+"Drummond is back with his twelve hundred, sir.  Marched to Fort
+George and back without stopping; did the last mile on a run too, in
+this heat.  The enemy has brought his guns into action, you can hear
+them.  Our left is smashed up, and General Riall is captured.  But I
+guess we can stick it out.  Can I do anything for you?  We have no
+water."
+
+"No, I can hear it all going over the Falls," said Sir John,
+wandering a little.  "I would like to know that Bee was safe."
+
+Percy left him in the church and went out.  There was a lull in the
+fighting.  It was now nine o'clock at night, and the battle had
+lasted since six.  The moon had risen, throwing a pale light on the
+dead and wounded heaped among the graves and down the hill, and all
+along the road between the orchards.  The heat was terrific, no
+coolness having come with the night, and neither army had a drop of
+water.  The fighting men, many of whom had been marching all day,
+suffered intolerably with thirst, and the wounded, torn with the
+frightful bayonet and scorching in an inferno of heat and pain, soon
+grew delirious.
+
+The moon was hidden by clouds, and in the black darkness out flashed
+the enemy's guns into the orchards.  From both sides came charging
+crowds of wildly yelling men upon the British centre, where their
+guns sent back a flaming answer.  Men fired wherever they saw fire,
+then closed into the dark with their foes.  All order was lost.
+Lundy's Lane and the graveyard hill, were covered with men fighting
+with sword and pistol, stabbing with shortened bayonet, and clenching
+like wild beasts.
+
+The British guns were captured, but the Americans could neither fire
+nor move them, such was the fury of the mob of men that threw
+themselves upon them.  And above all, the crash of musketry, and the
+yells and whoops of the fighting men, rose the screaming of the
+wounded.
+
+* * *
+
+Almost under the feet of plunging, crazy horses; knocked down more
+than once by excited men; with bullets whistling round her, Bee
+stumbled through the dark with a pail of water.  Other women were
+there too, on the same attempt at mercy.  The few men who had seen
+them ordered them back instantly, but being women they did not obey.
+
+A fitful gleam of moonlight showed men twisting on the ground before
+her, and she knelt to put water to the pitiful lips.  Then she had a
+glimpse of Ned, fighting furiously with his clubbed musket.  Someone
+pushed her into the wreck of the church, and there she found her
+grandfather.
+
+"Thank God, you are safe, little Bee," he said, roused to a last
+flash of consciousness by her voice.
+
+"Happy man," murmured Percy, as they laid him, bleeding with a dozen
+wounds, by the dead baronet, "he need never know of Vere now."
+
+The battle of Lundy's Lane had ended, as suddenly as it began.
+
+* * *
+
+Scott, with the captured British general and guns, retreated back to
+Buffalo, where he reported that he had won the battle, but that to
+follow up his victory, he must have a far larger army, to overcome
+the savage resistance of the Canadians.
+
+But there were no more invasions of Canada, for the battleships of
+England were off the American coast.  In vain the Tzar of Russia
+offered to arbitrate; Washington was burnt on August twenty-fourth.
+The English were driven back from Baltimore, but made raids on the
+shores of the Democrat States, who were blamed for the invasion of
+Canada.
+
+At last, on December twenty-fourth, 1814, peace was signed at Ghent,
+no word being said in its articles about the "Right to Search," which
+had been used as a cry to incite the American people to war, but
+without steamer or telegraph it was weeks before the news could cross
+the Atlantic, and the bloody battle of New Orleans, an English
+defeat, was fought in the January after peace was signed.
+
+York raised her flags in joyful thanksgiving, and Percy saw them as
+he sat up for the first time.  Haslem Towers stood empty, in England,
+and men talked of the "wicked baronet" somewhere abroad.  Percy
+intended to make his home in Canada, and he was very disappointed
+that Ferguson would not stay with him.  Instead of remaining as the
+trusted servant of a man he had always liked with high wages and sure
+provision for his old age, the Methodist had heard the call of the
+nation that was being born in Canada.  He longed to be a preacher to
+the men who had fought so well for an earthly country at Lundy's Lane
+and many a fight before.  So he applied to Conference, and they were
+about to advance the money to buy his discharge, and then accept him
+as one of their itinerant preachers.
+
+Ned was in the old pasture, tramping through the snow, and thinking
+of the summer morning when he had crept there, with his spirit
+broken, and a girl had healed him by her kiss of faith.  Eli was with
+him, he had returned to take his sister back to Boston, if she would
+come.
+
+"But I am not surprised that she refuses," Eli was saying.  "She was
+so young when she went to Canada to live, and Canada is so loyal to
+the British flag.  If we had only known your real feelings we would
+never have fought you.  May the peace between us endure."
+
+Then Ned spoke, but not of politics, and Eli smiled--"My father
+trusted your father with my sister, so I cannot do less than trust
+her to you.  The Haslems are willing, so the only person whose
+consent you need is--Bee Goode."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77341 ***