“I’d like to oblige you, Lieutenant Kenton, but I intend to see that you don’t reach General Lee.”

“Still harping upon that?  It seems to me that you’re a stupidly stubborn man.  Don’t you know that I’m going anyhow?”

Harry had never ceased to watch his eyes, and he saw there the signal of a coming movement.  Shepard dived suddenly for him, intending to repeat his own trick, but the youth was like a fish in the water, and he darted to the right.  The man came up grasping nothing.  Harry laughed.  The chagrin of Shepard compelled his amusement, although he liked the man.

“I wish you’d go away, Mr. Shepard,” he said.  “On land you could, perhaps, overpower me, but in the water I think I’m your master.  All through my boyhood I devoted a great deal of my time to swimming.  Dr. Russell of the Pendleton Academy—­but you never knew him—­used to say that if I would swim less and study more I could make greater pretensions to scholarship.”

Shepard, swimming rather easily, regarded him thoughtfully.

“While we talk to each other in this more or less polite manner, Mr. Kenton,” he said, “we must not forget that we’re in deadly earnest.  I mean to take you, and our scouts mean to take every other messenger who goes out from Colonel Sherburne’s camp.  You know, and I know, that if the Army of Northern Virginia does not reach in a few days that camp, where there is a ford in ordinary weather, it will be driven up against the Potomac and we can accumulate such great forces against it that it cannot possibly escape.  Even at Sherburne’s place its escape is more than doubtful, if it has to linger long.”

“Yes, I know these things quite well, Mr. Shepard.  I know also, as you do, that General Meade’s army is not in direct pursuit, and, that in a flanking movement, he is advancing across South Mountain and toward Sharpsburg.  It is a march well calculated and extremely dangerous to General Lee, if he does not hear of it in time.  But he will hear of it soon enough.  A comrade of mine, George Dalton, will tell him.  Others from Colonel Sherburne’s camp will tell him, and I mean to tell him too.  I hope to be the first to do so.”

Harry never deceived himself for a moment.  He knew that although Shepard liked him, he would go to the uttermost to stop him, and as for himself, while he had a friendly feeling for the spy, he meant to use every weapon he could against him.  Realizing that he could not linger much longer, as the chill of the water was already entering his body, he swam closer to Shepard, still staring directly into his eyes.  How thankful he was now for those innumerable swimmings in the little river that ran near Pendleton!  Everything learned well justifies itself some day.

Although there was but little moonlight they were so close together that they could see the eyes of each other clearly, and Harry detected a trace of uneasiness in those of Shepard.  A good swimmer, the water nevertheless was not his element, and although a man of great physique and extraordinary powers, he longed for the solid earth under his feet.