Page:The Partisan (revised).djvu/76

 in the hollows between these poles. You fell your tree, always a good big one, to make your ridge&mdash;your backbone; and if it be a causeway like this, running through a swamp, that you would build, why you fell your dozen trees, or more, according to the freshet's call for them. You lay them side by side, not across, but, up and down the road, taking care to put the big ones in the centre. So you may run it for miles, heaping the earth up to the logs. A road made after that fashion will stand a thousand years, while such a thing as this must always be washing away with every freshet. It takes, in the first place, you see, a great deal more of labour and time, and a great deal more of timber, to build it after this fashion; then, it takes more dirt to cover the rails&mdash;a hundred times the quantity&mdash;and unless they're well covered, they can't be kept down; they will always come loose, and be floating with every rain, and then the water settles heavily in their places and between them. This can't be the case where you lay the timber up and down, as I tell you. It must stand fast; for the rain can't settle, and the earth gathers close to the ridge, and hugs it tighter the more the water beats on it. Besides, building it this way, you use heavy timber, which the waters can't move at any season. But here we stop; we have no further use for the causeway to-night; there's our mark. See to that white tree there; it's a blasted pine, and it shines in a dark night as if it was painted. The lightning peeled it from top to toe. It's a'most two years since. I was not far off in the swamp, catching terrapins, when it was struck, and I was stupified for an hour after, and my head had a ringing in it I didn't get rid of for a month."

"What, do we go aside here?" inquired Davis, who did not seem to relish the diversion, as the first plunge they were required to make from the broken causeway was into a turbid pond, black, and almost covered with fragments of decayed timber and loose bundles of brush.

"Yes, that's our path," replied Humphries, who resolutely put his horse forward as he spoke.

"This is about one of the worst places, major, that we shall have to go through, and we take it on purpose, so that we may not be tracked so easily. Here, when we leave the causeway, we make no