It was three soldiers, escaping from the rout of Braddock's forces, who
caught the alleged betrayer of their general and put him to the death.
They threw his purse of ill-gotten louis d'or into the river, and sent
him swinging from the edge of a ravine, with a vine about his neck and a
placard on his breast. And so they left him.

Twenty years pass, and the war-fires burn more fiercely in the vales of
Pennsylvania, but, too old to fight, the schoolmaster sits at his door
near Chad's Ford and smokes and broods upon the past. He thinks of the
time when he marched with Washington, when with two wounded comrades he
returned along the lonely trail; then comes the vision of a blackening
face, and he rises and wipes his brow. "It was right," he mutters. "He
sent a thousand of his brothers to their deaths."

Gilbert Gates comes that evening to see the old man's daughter: a smooth,
polite young fellow, but Mayland cannot like him, and after some short
talk he leaves him, pleading years and rheumatism, and goes to bed. But
not to sleep; for toward ten o'clock his daughter goes to him and urges
him to fly, for men are gathering near the house--Tories, she is
sure,--and they mean no good. Laughing at her fears, but willing to
relieve her anxiety, the old man slips into his clothes, goes into the
cellar, and thence starts for the barn, while the girl remains for a few
minutes to hide the silver.

He does not go far before Gates is at his elbow with the whispered words,
"Into the stack-quick. They are after you." Mayland hesitates with
distrust, but the appearance of men with torches leaves no time for talk.
With Gilbert's help he crawls deep into the straw and is covered up.
Presently a rough voice asks which way he has gone. Gilbert replies that