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.