It was a strange experience for a boy, and Neil had become such a queer combination of outspoken child and shrewd veteran as can be matched in these days only by the gamins who fight their battles in the city streets. Without losing his boyishness he had acquired a military swagger which he knew enough to suppress when there was any advantage to be gained by acting like a child, and underneath swagger and boyishness there burned the revengeful, deep-seated hatred of Tories which marked all but a few of the patriots of those days. In Neil it was an unchildlike passion, giving him strength on long marches, putting a keen barb to his wit, making him trusted in the army beyond his years. Before the real beginning of the Revolution his father had been hanged by the Tory government for taking part in a popular outbreak, and his mother had been crazed by grief. From the shadow of such an early childhood Neil had emerged almost a man in purpose at thirteen and very fierce at heart. Yet, in spite of a bronzed face, he was still exceedingly coltish and immature in appearance, with round, wide-open blue eyes, a shock of long, sunburned hair, and legs that also were long and sunburned, having seldom been covered by a substantial, untorn garment. There was a great amount of speed available in the bare legs, and under the shock of hair there was plenty of boyish logic and common sense. Altogether, he was handy to have about, and he was sent on so many errands from officer to officer that he was known around all the cheerless campfires in Greene’s army. Even the general kept him in mind, and at times permitted him to undertake important missions. He had carried more than one of the appeals for reënforcements which Greene kept sending to the governors of North and South Carolina and Virginia, and to the military leaders of the three states. His way had lain through a country swarming with enemies, and he had come safely through encounters in which a man’s errand would have been investigated.