I might have made my exit sooner, I suppose. Though he tossed restlessly in his bunk, Jack was asleep before I had filled my second pipe. But there was no object in my reaching Nyack before tide-turning, and I stayed on, dreading the moment which would set the wheels fairly a-grind on my hazard of new fortunes. It was the hour of guard-changing when I rose noiselessly, struggled into my watchcoat, slung my sword around my neck so that it should not drag and waken Jack, and cautiously secured the little portmanteau which held all the impedimenta I had brought with me from the camp at Salem. I was carefully inching the door ajar to let me out when Pettus stirred afresh and threw his arms about, muttering in his sleep. I waited till he should be quiet again, and while I stood and held the door, the mutterings took on something like coherence. “I say you shall drink it! Up, man, up! Now, then; here’s to the loyalty of the Old Dominion, and may the next Virginian who smirches it----” I whipped through the half-closed door and closed it behind me, softly. It was sobering enough to do what I had to do, without staying to listen to such a word of leave-taking from the dearest friend I owned. I found the borrowed horse where I had left him at the hitching-rope, and had the saddle on, and the portmanteau strapped to the cantle, when Middleton came up with the guard relief. “Ho, Captain Page!” he chuckled, when the patrol had thrown the lantern light into my face, “I thought I had caught another deserter in the very act. Has your leave expired so soon?” I forced a laugh and said it had, more was the pity. And then he asked how I expected to get across the river at that hour; whereupon I told him a part of the truth, saying that I should ride back to Nyack, and from there take the small boat in which I had drifted and rowed down from Teller’s Point. At this he had the saddle flung upon his own beast, and mounted and rode with me to put me past the sentries on the Nyack road; and now I was enough recovered to grin under cover of the darkness and to picture his rage and astonishment when, within a day or so, he should learn that he had been setting another deserter safely on his way to the British lines. For I made no doubt that the camp, and all the others in the Highlands, would presently be ringing with the news that a captain of Baylor’s Horse had been the latest to go over to the enemy--as, indeed, I hoped they would, since my best guaranty of safety in New York would be in the hue and cry I might leave behind me. Lieutenant Middleton bade me God-speed at a turn in the road about a mile from his cantonments, and from this on to Nyack I pushed the borrowed nag smartly. At Van Ditteraick’s stable there was only a sleepy horse-boy to rouse up and meet me, and when I had paid the horse’s hire, I made him go with me to the waterside to help me embark, so there might be a witness of the way I went and the manner of my going.