She slipped cautiously away, and travelled carefully to Bellingham, where she enlisted as a Continental soldier on a three years' term. She was mustered into the army at Worcester, under the name of Robert Shurtleff. With about fifty other soldiers she soon arrived at West Point, and it there fell to her lot to be in Captain Webb's company, in Colonel Shepard's regiment, and in General Patterson's brigade.
Naturally the girl's disappearance from home had caused her friends and her family great uneasiness. Her mother reproached herself for having urged too constantly upon the attention of her child the suit of a man for whom she did not care, and her lover upbraided himself for having been too importunate in his wooing. The telephone and telegraph not having been invented, it was necessary, in order to trace the lost girl, to visit all the places to which Deborah might have flown. Her brother, therefore, made an expedition one hundred miles to the eastward among some of the family relations, and her suitor took his route to the west of Massachusetts and across into New York State.
In the course of his search he visited, as it happened, the very place in which Deborah's company was stationed, and saw (though he did not recognise) his lost sweetheart. She recognised him, however, and hearing his account to the officers of her mother's grief and anxiety, sent home as soon as opportunity offered, the following letter:
"DEAR PARENT:--On the margin of one of those rivers which intersects and winds itself so beautifully majestic through a vast extent of territory of the United States is the present situation of your unworthy but constant and affectionate daughter. I pretend not to justify or even to palliate my clandestine elopement. In hopes of pacifying your mind, which I am sure must be afflicted beyond measure, I write you this scrawl. Conscious of not having thus abruptly absconded by reason of any fancied ill treatment from you, or disaffection toward any, the thoughts of my disobedience are truly poignant. Neither have I a plea that the insults of man have driven me hence: and let this be your consoling reflection--that I have not fled to offer more daring insults to them by a proffered prostitution of that virtue which I have always been taught to preserve and revere. The motive is truly important; and when I divulge it my sole ambition and delight shall be to make an expiatory sacrifice for my transgression.