CHAPTER VIII.
"There shall be joy for this. Shall we not laugh— |
Travis, the faithful coadjutor of the tory Huck, was on his march into the swamp before daylight. As Humphries had anticipated, he took the path, if so it might be called, on which the ambuscade had been laid for him. He might not have done so, had he dreamed for an instant of the existence in this quarter of such a body of men as that now preparing to receive him. Looking on his object, however, simply as the arrest of Frampton, and the scouring, of the swamp of such stragglers besides as might have been led for shelter into its recesses, he adopted the route which was obviously most accessible, and most likely, therefore, to be resorted to by the merely skulking discontent. The half-military eye, looking out for an enemy in any respect equal in strength, would have either studiously avoided the ridge over which Travis now presumed to ride, or would have adopted some better precautions than he had troubled himself to take. It was naturally a strong defile, well calculated for an easy defence, as only a small force could possibly be of use upon it. But two persons could ride abreast in the prescribed direction, and then only with great difficulty and by slow movement; for little gullies and fissures continually intersected the path, which was circuitous and winding, and, if not always covered with water and swamp, quite as difficult to overcome, from its luxuriant growth of umbrage.
Though an old traveller in such fastnesses, these obstructions were in no sort pleasant to the leader of the British party, who, being a notorious grumbler, accompanied every step which he took with grunting sort of commentary by way of disapprobation.
"Now, may the devil take these gullies, that go as deep when you get into them as if they were made for him. This is a day's
