I came at last to the river bank with its fringe of trees and willows and canes.  My intention was to swim across, but the current was swift, the water forbiddingly dark and cold.  A mist obscured the other bank.  I could not, indeed, see the water more than a few yards out.  It was a hazardous and horrible undertaking, and I gave it up, following cautiously along the bank in search of the spot where we had moored the boat.  True, it was hardly likely that the landing was now unguarded, or, if so, that the boat was still there.  Cobb had undoubtedly made for it, having an even more urgent need than I; but hope springs eternal in the human breast, and there was a chance that he had been killed before reaching it.  I came at last into the road that we had taken and consumed half the night in cautiously approaching the landing, pistol in hand and heart in mouth.  The boat was gone!  I continued my journey along the stream—­in search of another.

My clothing was still damp from my morning bath, my teeth rattled with cold, but I kept on along the stream until I reached the limit of the cornfields and entered a dense wood.  Through this I groped my way, inch by inch, when, suddenly emerging from a thicket into a space slightly more open, I came upon a smoldering camp-fire surrounded by prostrate figures of men, upon one of whom I had almost trodden.  A sentinel, who ought to have been shot, sat by the embers, his carbine across his lap, his chin upon his breast.  Just beyond was a group of unsaddled horses.  The men were asleep; the sentinel was asleep; the horses were asleep.  There was something indescribably uncanny about it all.  For a moment I believed them all lifeless, and O’Hara’s familiar line, “The bivouac of the dead,” quoted itself in my consciousness.  The emotion that I felt was that inspired by a sense of the supernatural; of the actual and imminent peril of my position I had no thought.  When at last it occurred to me I felt it as a welcome relief, and stepping silently back into the shadow retraced my course without having awakened a soul.  The vividness with which I can now recall that scene is to me one of the marvels of memory.

Getting my bearings again with some difficulty, I now made a wide detour to the left, in the hope of passing around this outpost and striking the river beyond.  In this mad attempt I ran upon a more vigilant sentinel, posted in the heart of a thicket, who fired at me without challenge.  To a soldier an unexpected shot ringing out at dead of night is fraught with an awful significance.  In my circumstances—­cut off from my comrades, groping about an unknown country, surrounded by invisible perils which such a signal would call into eager activity—­the flash and shock of that firearm were unspeakably dreadful!  In any case I should and ought to have fled, and did so; but how much or little of conscious prudence there was in the prompting I do not care to discover by analysis of memory.  I went back into the corn, found the river, followed it back a long way and mounted into the fork of a low tree.  There I perched until the dawn, a most uncomfortable bird.