When the second repulse and consequent flight took place, Ephraim and Lucius followed the example of most of their comrades by compulsion, and sought the shelter of the woods, where they were at least safer from the cannonade than in the open. Looking up the valley from Lewiston towards Port Republic, a bird’s-eye view would have revealed three marked topographical features, roughly speaking, parallel to one another. On the right was the Shenandoah River; next to this, and to the left of it, open country and cultivated fields; and farther still to the left, the dense forest, three miles wide, which extended to the base of the Blue Ridge. When forced to descend in the balloon, the boys had entered the wood on the side next the mountain, and their flight from the colonel and subsequent wanderings had carried them clear across it to the side facing the river, where they had fallen in with the little hut in the clearing, which was really a woodsman’s cabin on the Lewiston estate. They were now, therefore, still on the same side as the hut, but a mile or so above it.
‘I tell ye what it is, Luce,’ said Ephraim in his companion’s ear, as they hurried along, ‘we air goin’ too fast. We’ll be in the Yankee camp at this rate before many minnits is over. Let’s hang back a bit.’
They did so, gradually slackening their pace, and allowing the stream of fugitives to roll past them, till at last being, so far as they could see, alone, they sat down under a tree to take breath.
For a moment they looked at one another in silence. Then Ephraim said with a good deal of emotion in his voice: ‘I am the most or’nery fool in a town whar there’s a good few er the sort. I thort ter let ye hev a piece er funnin’, and now I’ve nearly been the death er ye twice, and gracious knows what’ll happen yit before we git through with this one-horse adventure.’
‘I don’t call it a one-horse adventure,’ replied Lucius. ‘A whole team would be more like it. I imagine this is what you might call a pretty crowded day. Eh, Grizzly?’
‘Waal, I ’low it is so fur,’ admitted Ephraim with the ghost of a smile. ‘Same time, I dunno what I’d hev done ter myself ef ennythin’ had gone wrong with ye in thet rumpus jest now. I’d never hev got over it or fergiv myself. By time! ter see them two pore men go down like thet alongside us all in a moment. It might jest ez well hev been you.’ He blew his nose loudly, and furtively knuckled his eyes.