Stout Cortez-- Silent upon a peak in Darien. It was just that stout way in which he now walked that gave him his opportunity for escape--that time. All that day the other prisoners went with hanging heads, tramping through the deep mud of the southern roads in winter, but father walked with his head up. Another night came and they were again in a forest, on a dark and lonely road, with the guards walking at the side and sometimes quite lost in the shadows cast by the trees--the prisoners a dark mass in the very centre of the road. Father stumbled over a stick, the heavy branch of a tree, quite dead and broken off by the wind, and, stooping down, picked it up. Something, perhaps just the impulse of a soldier, led him to sling the stick lightly over his shoulder and carry it like a gun. There he was, stepping proudly among those who were not proud--that is to say, the other prisoners--and not having any plan in mind--just thinking of his virginal sister back there, I dare say; and one of the two officers of the guard spoke to him kindly. “Don’t walk in there so close to the Yanks, in the deep mud, John,” the officer said; “it’s better going out here. There is a path here at the side. Get in here back of me.” By his very pride, lifted up out of the ranks of the prisoners, father’s mind acted quickly and with a muttered thanks he stepped to the side of the road and became as one of the guards. The men came out on the crest of another low hill and again, in the valley below, there was the faint light of a farmhouse. “Halt!” one of the officers gave command; and then--the younger of the two officers having been told by his superior to send a man down into the valley to the farmhouse to see if there was a chance for the guard and prisoners to rest for a few hours and to get food--he sent father. The officer touched him on the arm. “Go on you,” he said. “You go down and find out.” So off father went, down a lane, holding the stick very correctly, like a gun, until he was safely out of sight of the others, and then he threw the stick away and ran. The devil! He knew every inch of the ground on which he now stood. What an opportunity for escape! One of his boyhood friends had lived in the very house, toward which he was supposed to be going, and often, in his young manhood and when he had come home for vacation from the northern school, he had ridden and hunted along the very path his feet now touched. Why, the very dogs and “niggers” on the place knew him as they might have known their master. And so, if he ran madly now, he ran knowing the ground under his feet. Ah, he would be sure! When his escape was discovered dogs might be set on his trail.