It was dusk again before they awoke. They were desperately hungry, but
they agreed to spend one more night in the river before searching for
food, so as to put as much distance as possible between themselves and
Cawnpore. They had been twenty hours in the water before, and allowing two
miles an hour for the current, and something for their swimming, they
calculated that Cawnpore must be forty-six or forty-seven miles behind.
Eight hours' more steady swimming added twenty to this, and they landed
again with a hope that Nana Sahib's ferocious bands must have been left
behind, and that they had now only the ordinary danger of travel in such
times, through a hostile country, to face.

It yet wanted an hour or so of daybreak, and they struck off at right
angles to the river, and walked till it became light, when they entered a
small wood near to which was a hut. Watching this closely, they saw only
an old man come out, and at once made to it, and asked him for food and
shelter. Recovered from his first surprise, he received them kindly, and
gave them the best which his hut, in which he lived alone with his wife,
afforded. A meal of cakes and parched grain greatly revived them, and,
after a long sleep, they started again at nightfall, with enough food for
the next two days' supply. That they were not ahead of all their foes was
certain, from the fact that the peasant said that he had heard firing on
the river bank on the previous day. They knew by this also that the one
boat ahead of them had at any rate escaped its perils of the first day.

For two more nights they walked, passing one day in a thick wood, the
other in a ruined temple, their hopes rising; for, as they knew, the
further they got from Cawnpore the loss likely the country people were to
be hostile.

The third morning they again entered a hut to ask for food.