Page:The Partisan (revised).djvu/74

CHAPTER VI. {|align="center" style="font-size:90%;line-height:135%" "Stretch out thy waud before thou set'st thy foot; 'Tis a dim way before thee, aud the trees Of byegone centuries bave spread their arms Athwart thy path. Now make thy footiug sure And now, God cheer us, for the toil is done."
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had fairly set in&mdash;a clear starlight night&mdash;before the three set forth upon their proposed adventure. To Major Singleton, who was a native of the middle country, and had lived heretofore almost exclusively in it, the path they now travelled was entirely unknown. It was necessary, therefore, to move on slowly and with due circumspection. But for this, the party would have advanced with as much speed as if they were pursuing the common highway; for, to the other two, accustomed all their lives to the woodland cover and the tangled recesses of the swamps, their present route, uncleared, in close thicket growth, and diverging as it continually did, was, nevertheless, no mystery. Though necessarily somewhat slow in their progress, the delay was much less than might have been expected; for Singleton, however ignorant of the immediate ground over which they sped, was yet thoroughly versed in forest life, and had traversed the larger and denser swamps of the Santee, a task, though similar, infinitely more difficult and extensive than the one now before him. After a little while, therefore, when his eye grew more accustomed to the peculiar shades about him, he spurred his good steed forward with much more readiness than at their first setting out, and it was not long before the yielding of the soil beneath his hoofs and the occasional plash of the water, together with the more frequent appearance of the solemn and ghostly cypresses around them, gave sufficient indication of the proximity of the swamp recesses.

They had ridden some five miles, and in all this time no word had been spoken by either of the three, except when, here and