Jack wondered that his friend had never spoken of the capture of prisoners.

“He was a modest man,” said the young scout.

“He didn’t want the British to know where Solomon Binkus was at work, and I guess he was wise,” said the Major.  “I advise you against taking the chances that he took.  It isn’t necessary.  You would be caught much sooner than he was.”

That day Bartlett took Jack over Solomon’s trail and gave him the lay of the land and much good advice.  A young man of Jack’s spirit, however, is apt to have a degree of enterprise and self-confidence not easily controlled by advice.  He had been traveling alone for three days when he felt the need of more exciting action.  That night he crossed the Charles River on the ice in a snow-storm and captured a sentinel and brought him back to camp.

About this time he wrote another letter to the family, in which he said: 

“The boys are coming back from home and reenlisting.  They have not been paid—­no one has been paid—­but they are coming back.  More of them are coming than went away.

“They all tell one story.  The women and the old men made a row about their being at home in time of war.  On Sunday the minister called them shirks.  Everybody looked askance at them.  A committee of girls went from house to house reenlisting the boys.  So here they are, and Washington has an army, such as it is.”

4

Soon after that the daring spirit of the youth led him into a great adventure.  It was on the night of January fifth that Jack penetrated the British lines in a snow-storm and got close to an outpost in a strip of forest.  There a camp-fire was burning.  He came close.  His garments had been whitened by the storm.  The air was thick with snow, his feet were muffled in a foot of it.  He sat by a stump scarcely twenty feet from the fire, seeing those in its light, but quite invisible.  There he could distinctly hear the talk of the Britishers.  It related to a proposed evacuation of the city by Howe.

“I’m weary of starving to death in this God-forsaken place,” said one of them.  “You can’t keep an army without meat or vegetables.  I’ve eaten fish till I’m getting scales on me.”

“Colonel Riffington says that the army will leave here within a fortnight,” another observed.

It was important information which had come to the ear of the young scout.  The talk was that of well bred Englishmen who were probably officers.

“We ought not to speak of those matters aloud,” one of them remarked.  “Some damned Yankee may be listening like the one we captured.”

“He was Amherst’s old scout,” said another.  “He swore a blue streak when we shoved him into jail.  They don’t like to be treated like rebels.  They want to be prisoners of war.”