ng a careful canvass of the swamp for me.

When night had fallen I cautiously left my place of concealment, dodged
across the road into the woods and made for the river through the mile of
corn. Such corn! It towered above me like a forest, shutting out all the
starlight except what came from directly overhead. Many of the ears were a
yard out of reach. One who has never seen an Alabama river-bottom
cornfield has not exhausted nature's surprises; nor will he know what
solitude is until he explores one in a moonless night.

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 occ