The hope was not unfounded, as the event proved. Right in the midst of the map talk he broke off to ask me if I were leg-weary, and if I would favor him by accompanying him to the garden in the rear of the house, where, as he said, it was his nightly custom to walk off the perplexities and brain fatigues of the day. Anything was better than being hived up in the house with him, I decided, and while the garden promised little, it had the advantage of being out-of-doors and a few paces nearer to the river which must be my highway to success and freedom, if any highway were to be found. So we tramped down the stair again, and I had my first unsatisfactory sight of the garden at the back. As well as I could make out in the starlight, it was a long and rather narrow area, enclosed within a high wooden fence, with a graveled walk running down the middle of it, and with a few shrubs and stunted trees growing in the neglected flower- and vegetable-beds; as safe a place against any desperate kidnapping purpose as any that could be found outside of the garrison prison yard. Arnold was still harping upon the Virginia coast and its anchorages when we began to pace a weary sentry-beat side by side up and down the graveled walk, and he kept it up with a great persistence, inquiring minutely into the navigating particulars, and keeping me so busy misleading him that I could not get a moment for the consideration of any plotting plan at all. But as for that, the whole heavens and earth and all the universe were blankly void of suggestion. I could think of nothing that offered the slightest chance of success. To drop a step behind, to give him a sudden wrestler’s back-throw and afterward to bind and gag him were all simple enough. My six feet of good, sound, country-bred Virginia bone and muscle would answer for these primitive beginnings. But having trussed my fowl, I should be like the man who stole a hobbled horse, which he could neither carry nor ride. I could never hope to escape out of the high-fenced garden with my captive, or to reach the river unhalted, or, reaching it, to have the fairy luck of finding a boat with oars shipped and waiting for me to pull away in. One of these difficulties--the least of them--overcame itself as we were wheeling to make one of our face-abouts at the lower end of the walk. A board in the high fence paling had been displaced, and when I touched it with my foot it fell outward with a dry clatter and left a gap in the enclosure. “Your boundaries are tumbling down, General Arnold,” I remarked carelessly; and he replied that it mattered little, since they would be another’s boundaries very shortly. After which he paid no more attention to the gap opened by the falling board; but I did, and every time we made the turn at the walk’s end it tempted me. If I only knew what lay beyond: how far it was to the river’s edge, and what one of a thousand chances I might have of finding a boat unlocked and with oars in it!