It seemed a hazardous thing to take an army thence southward again, with supplies, through the forests where Greene moved; news came that General Arnold was in Virginia with a considerable body of Clinton’s troops from New York, to anticipate what the southern commander had planned to do for the conquest of the Old Dominion when the Carolinas should have been “pacified” from end to end; and Cornwallis determined to move northward instead of southward, and join Arnold in Virginia. Greene moved a little way in his track, and then turned southward again against the garrisons of the inland posts. Lord Rawdon beat him at Hobkirk’s Hill (April 25th) and held him off at Eutaw Springs (September 8th); but both times the English withdrew to save their communications; and, though the work was slow in the doing, before winter came again they were shut within the fortifications of Charleston and the country-sides were once more in American possession, to be purged of loyalist bands at leisure. [Illustration: EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN FLAG] In Virginia, Lord Cornwallis moved for a little while freely and safely enough; but only for a little while. Baron Steuben had been busy, winter and spring, raising recruits there for an army of defence; General Washington hurried the Marquis de Lafayette southward with twelve hundred light infantry from his own command; and by midsummer, 1781, Lafayette was at the British front with a force strong enough to make it prudent that Cornwallis should concentrate his strength and once more make sure of his base of supplies at the coast. His watchful opponents out-manœuvred him, caught his forces once and again in detail, and made his outposts unsafe. By the first week in August he had withdrawn to the sea and had taken post behind intrenchments at Yorktown, something more than seven thousand strong.