On this the gaoler, his assistants, and even many of the townspeople, fled to the woods. Moody then burst into the gaol through the window, and found the condemned soldier in his cell fast asleep. 'There is no possibility,' says Moody's Narrative (now out of print), 'of describing the agony of this man when he saw before him a man in arms, attended by persons he was utterly at a loss to recognise. The first and only idea that occurred to him was, that, as many of the friends of the government had been privately executed in prison, the person he saw was his executioner!' Moody released and carried off with him all the prisoners, including the soldier, who, by a strange freak of fortune, was afterwards taken again during the war, and hanged in the same prison, and in virtue of the old sentence, though we are told that his only crime was 'an unshaken allegiance to his sovereign.' This seems barely probable, as another soldier, a Scotsman named Robert Maxwell, was executed at the same time for robbery and plunder. On the 6th of March, 1781, when Moody was still an ensign, the Adjutant-General, Oliver de Lancy, of the 17th Light Dragoons, successor in office to the ill-fated André, proposed 'an expedition into the rebel country, for the purpose of intercepting the despatches of Mr. Washington.' Moody instantly undertook the task, and marching his party twenty-five miles that night, concealed them in a morass; but the guide lost heart, which so enraged Moody that he would have shot him, but for the sake of his wife and family, and was compelled to return to New York. Colonel de Lancy was much disappointed; the guide was made a prisoner, and on the 11th of the same month Moody set forth again, and reached the Haverstraw Mountains, which overlook the Hudson, amid a snow-storm, and by the 15th he captured the despatches and their bearer; but so great were the hardships undergone that some of his men perished of cold and hunger. For this, Moody, who had been one year a volunteer, and three an ensign, was promoted to a lieutenancy. About the middle of May the adjutant-general, being in want of intelligence, suggested to Moody the capture of another 'rebel mail;' and on the night of the 15th he set forth with four well-armed men, and after proceeding many miles, he found himself beset on three sides by a considerable number of the Colonial troops, who, having secret intelligence of his movements from New York, were then in ambush awaiting him.