“They won’t give up so easily,” Hadley muttered, not daring to look around while still in the orchard. “That Colonel Knowles would rather die than be outwitted by a boy. I’ll make right for the ferry, and perhaps I may meet Holdness somewhere on the road. I can give the papers up to him, and I know he’ll find some way of getting them to General Washington.”
He pulled Black Molly’s head around and took a nearer slant for the road. The mare was more easily managed now, and when he reached the rail fence which divided the orchard from the highway his mount had forgotten her fright and allowed him to stop and fling down a part of the fence so that they could get through and down the bank into the road. Looking back before descending the bank, Hadley saw several horsemen streaming through the orchard behind him, and, more to be feared than these, was the party leaving the inn yard and taking to the very road out upon which he had come. At the head of this second cavalcade rode Colonel Knowles himself on his great charger, and Hadley’s heart sank. Black Molly was famed throughout the countryside for her speed; but that great beast of the colonel’s--evidently brought from across the sea, and a thoroughbred hunter--would be more than a match for the little mare in a long chase.
“We must do our best, Molly,” cried the boy, slapping her side with his palm and riding down into the dusty road. “You can keep ahead of them, I know, for a short distance, and you must do your best now. It will soon be too dark for them to see us--that’s a blessing.”
The little mare needed no spur or urging. She clattered along the darkening road with head down and neck outstretched, Hadley riding with a loose rein and letting her pick her own way over the track. He could trust to her instinct more safely than to his own sight. The oaks cast thick shadows across his path, and now the whole sky was turning a deep indigo, dotted here and there with star points. There was no moon until later, and he believed the darkness was more favorable to him than to his pursuers.
He could hear the thunder of the hoofs behind him, however, and he patted Molly’s neck encouragingly and talked to her as she ran. “Go it, girl! you’ve got to go!” he said. “Just make your little feet fly. Remember the times I’ve rubbed you down, and fed you, and taken you to water. Just do your very prettiest, my girl, for it’s more than my life you’ve got to save--it’s these papers, whatever they be.”