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44 be the commander of bare-foot armies, already a hero of two defeats, he was yet to play the hero in bitter, pitiful extremities, to become a dogged believer in hopeless, last alternatives, a burden-bearer for hundreds of homeless ones—a people's mainstay when other men were faltering. Now, as in 1775, his task was to rouse a people only half awake to the crisis; to demonstrate the superiority of wisely ordered liberty over license, and the inferiority of personal independence compared with a unity made strong through faithful coöperation, and hallowed by mutual self-sacrifice. And fortunate it was for all the colonies that England compelled them to learn how to carry war's heavy harness now, against the day when they should be assailed by something more disastrously fatal to the cause of liberty than savages fired to murder and pillage by French brandy.

In all these wild days, the old path westward from Shippensburg and Carlisle was often crowded with fugitives fleeing from the reeking frontier, and, quite as often, shrouded in a cloud of dust raised by squads